Differentiated CSR: Standing apart from the CSR crowd.
Keywords:
Leadership, Ethics, CSRAbstract
With Corporate Social Responsibility’s (CSR) widespread proliferation comes the risk of its own redundancy as managers emulate perceived best practice CSR campaigns. This paper offers a theoretical conceptualization for how CSR activity can contribute to a firm’s social reputation when industry CSR initiatives are homogenous. It proposes that by differentiating the firm’s CSR actions from the CSR among firms intra-industry, focal firms can distinguish themselves from their CSR rivals. The conceptual model presented proposes that the enactment of a specific CSR type (e.g., differentiated CSR) when derived from resource endowments and embedded within a firm’s core strategy, may increase CSP and improve social reputation.