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Introduction
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has recently surfaced as a crucial aspect of organizations, and companies are becoming increasingly interested in CSR practices as strategic tools that can have a considerable impact on their perceived image (Jones et al., 2007; Shams, 2016), their legitimacy (Jakhar, 2017; Mohammed, 2013; Surroca et al., 2013) and performance (Ayuso et al., 2014; Salehi et al., 2018). CSR is also seen as a way to increase their competitive advantage (Jakhar, 2017) and discover new sources of value creation (Mohammed, 2013). At the same time, however, how to integrate CSR into day-to-day practices in terms of being compatible with the organization’s culture (Chatzoglou et al., 2017), how to reconcile the internal organization of CSR with an adequate response to stakeholder demands (Ayuso et al., 2014; Di Bella and Al-Fayoumi, 2016; Zhao et al., 2014), and how to find the balance between short- and long-term impacts or gains (Wu et al., 2013) are still unanswered questions.
CSR has several definitions (see e.g. Dahlsrud, 2008), but this paper chooses to define it in the same way the Commission of the European Communities (2001) does, i.e., “a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns into their business operations and into their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis” (Rodríguez Bolívar et al., 2015).
Multinational companies (MNCs) are a good context to study CSR because they manage portfolios of national entities (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 2002). For example, the arguably asymmetric CSR behaviour at home (headquarters) and in the host countries (subsidiaries) has been analyzed and the conclusion has been drawn that the transfer of CSR practices to subsidiaries can be positive (Jamali, 2010) or negative due to the transfer of less responsible behaviour to overseas subsidiaries (Surroca et al., 2013). In turn, subsidiaries are crucial players in MNCs because they are considered as value-adding entities in a host country (Birkinshaw, 1998). Local responsiveness in CSR is a particularly difficult challenge (Barin Cruz and Boehe, 2010; Bondy and Starkey, 2014) because the CSR practices in MNC subsidiaries often have contradictory interests when it comes to their stakeholders (Park and Choi, 2015), not least because they have a wider variety of them (Zhao et al.