Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

1-2020

Abstract

As part of the rise of a worldwide corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, companies have increasingly incorporated social and environmental concerns into their policies. This paper examines the extensiveness of these policies, proposing that an underappreciated contributor is the degree of organizational boundary spanning. The paper is novel in integrating multiple types of boundary spanning into a single empirical framework, including product, sub‐unit, and national boundary spanning. The paper adds complexity to the literature by theorizing that different types of boundary spanning associate with CSR policy extensiveness in different issue areas. The results show that product spanning associates with CSR policy extensiveness in the area of consumers, sub‐unit spanning in the areas of workers, and nation‐state spanning in all issue areas. A unique, comprehensive, and global data set of 2,714 prominent consumer goods companies in the GoodGuide database underpins these findings.

Keywords

corporate social responsibility, boundary spanning, corporate social policy, policy extensiveness

Discipline

Social Policy | Sociology

Research Areas

Sociology

Publication

Business Ethics: A European Review

ISSN

0962-8770

Identifier

10.1111/beer.12266

Publisher

Wiley: 24 months

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12266

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