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Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), integrating CSR theories, integrated theoretical framework, legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory, institutional theory
ABSTRACT
This paper constructs an integrated theoretical framework for explaining Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices by organisations. Three mainstream theories, namely legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory and institutional theory all of which have been employed in the CSR literature are integrated by considering theoretical predictive motivations of CSR practices.
The three theories have similarities and are interrelated; and we argue they are not competing, but complementary. Most importantly, they can be integrated and linked to CSR practices in order to explain motives of such practices in a multi-theoretical perspective.
This theoretical framework can be employed as a theoretical foundation for empirical studies relating to the reasons for CSR practices in various contexts. It attempts to obtain deep insights through more than one single theory in order to obtain fuller understanding of CSR practices. Further, it can be employed to check the extent to which these theories help to explain such practices.
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper constructs an integrated theoretical framework, employing three commonly used theories in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) literature, for explaining CSR practices. According to Gray, Owen, and Adams (2010), "Theory is, at its simplest, a conception of the relationship between things. It refers to a mental state or framework and, as a result, determines, inter alia, how we look at things, how we perceive things, what things we see as being joined to other things and what we see as 'good' and what we see as 'bad'" (p. 6). On the other hand, a combination of interrelated concepts is simply defined as a theoretical framework which may consist of a single theory or a collection of several theories (Collis & Hussey 2009; An, et al. 2011).
The CSR literature reveals that corporations, regardless of their geographical location or the developmental status of their operational country, are increasingly adopting CSR practices (ACCA 2010; KPMG 2011), but no commonly agreed theoretical perspective exists in explaining corporate behaviour in relation to CSR practices (Gray et al. 1995a; Deegan 2002; Belal 2008; Gray et al. 2010). Deegan (2002) further explained that "we do not have an 'accepted' theory for social and environmental accounting, [and] there is much...