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
Citation
LIM, Alwyn, & POPE, Shawn.(2020). Three types of organizational boundary spanning: Predicting CSR policy extensiveness among global consumer products companies. Business Ethics: A European Review, .
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3182
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12266