ABSTRACT
National institutional contexts of developing countries differ and so do corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of companies operating in these contexts. Prior research in cross-national comparative CSR has explored divergence in CSR across countries, but these studies have mainly focused upon developed countries. This has resulted in largely homogenous perspectives on CSR in developing countries. We begin to address this shortcoming by drawing upon two distinctive models of national business states relevant to developing country contexts. We theorize how divergence in CSR approaches across these states can be attributed to the differences in their national institutional settings and local levels of corruption. We illustrate our theorization through contrasting the employee and community relations cases of two companies originating from and operating in Botswana and Russia. We further argue that peculiarities and quality (i.e. corruption) of national institutional settings can have either a facilitating or hindering effect on developmental CSR outcomes in developing countries.
