The political economy of corporate social responsibility (CSR)

This dissertation aims to contribute to a more contextually informed analysis of CSR by studying how political-economic institutions influence CSR practices. Approaching CSR as a political phenomenon, the dissertation studies quantitatively whether political-economic institutions can explain variation in CSR practices across 20 advanced capitalist countries, as cross-national variation provides a key to understand the institutional foundations of CSR. However, the dissertation also seeks to provide a qualitative understanding of the mechanisms and processes by which political-economic institutions influence CSR. I therefore study indepth the CSR approach of state, market, and civil society actors in the Nordic countries, which I argue to be critical cases to our understanding of the political economy of CSR. To guide this qualitative and quantitative analysis, I develop an integrated analytical framework based on three complementary perspectives – comparative political economy, international political economy, and new-institutional theory