ABSTRACT
This article presents qualitative, case study research and contributes to the literature by presenting managers’ views on corporate social responsibility (CSR) within three different types of organizational contexts (non-profit, for-profit and a middle/hybrid case) that have never embedded CSR policies and practices. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no other study has compared managers’ CSR attitudes within such a combination of organizational contexts. The findings from this study indicate that some considerations with regards to CSR are transferable across organizational contexts (i.e. issues around the attainability of CSR, emphasis given to ethics and integrity and managers associating CSR with employee-related activities), while others are context specific. The context-specific ones show that organizational culture and an organization’s position in the non-profit/for-profit continuum are key contextual influences on managers’ CSR attitudes. Moreover, influences relating to individual managers’ work, as well as the extent to which CSR is an implicit or an explicit part of decision-making determine managerial perceptions of CSR. The implications for management practice (i.e. a one-size-fits-all approach to CSR practice is wrong) and CSR research (i.e. more context-sensitive and interdisciplinary research) are discussed. The findings are relevant both to organizations considering CSR engagement and those already implementing CSR.
