Managerial Perceptions of the Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper draws on interviews with 12 investor relations directors. These were used to elicit the mental models respondents used when explaining their firms’ motivation to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Four dimensions of CSR-induced competitive advantages emerged: risk, efficiency, branding, and new markets. Respondents from firms with lower social performance drew on less differentiated and less balanced cognitive frameworks (focussing on risk and efficiency). Respondents from firms with higher social performance reported not only more links between CSR and competitiveness, their underlying cognitive models were also more balanced across the four dimensions