Abstract
Given the steady interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR), this study explores the process of professionalization of CSR. Drawing upon the literature on ‘organizational’ professionals, explicit and implicit CSR, as well as varieties of capitalism, professionalization of CSR is explored in order to trace processes of explicitization and potential cross-national differences between the United States and Germany. In a comparative longitudinal study, we analyse job announcements in the field of CSR and find that although the hybridity of explicit and implicit CSR between the US and Germany is starting to unfold, job characteristics and job requirements in CSR in Germany and the US are still not the same. Our results suggest there is a more distinct trend in professionalization in the US than in Germany in terms of the manifestation of explicit CSR and that the institutional context is linked to how employers drive professionalization processes in non-traditional professions.
Introduction
Sustainability in the form of pursuing economic, environmental and social objectives has gained momentum in research and practices over the past decades (Aust et al., 2020). Because of stricter regulations by governments and political climates, many companies have increasingly committed themselves to sustainable development (Williams et al., 2019). More and more corporations participate in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (Kolk and Perego, 2010) and especially large multinational companies (MNCs) have invested in social and ecological policies and projects such as employees’ volunteering and the training of subcontractors’ employees to secure labour standards along the supply chain (Ramirez and Rainbird, 2010). The commitment to, and reorganization towards sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) implies that firms need to create and design jobs for pursuing, implementing, communicating and evaluating their sustainable business practices. Therefore, large corporations in recent years have established entire interdisciplinary and interdivisional CSR units, while others created single positions they often located within their human resources (HR) departments (De Stefano et al., 2018). Recent research focuses on the activities and challenges of CSR practitioners in enforcing CSR issues within firms (Jones and Rupp, 2018; Wang et al., 2016). Part of this individual-based research is studies that have explored the evolution of the nascent occupation of CSR by focusing on the challenges for CSR practitioners arising from their search for legitimacy because they do not meet the requisite criteria of a ‘true’ profession and therefore need to elaborate alternative strategies to become recognized as a ‘corporate’ profession (Brès et al., 2019; Furusten et al., 2013).
This debate on the dynamics in the occupational field of CSR, however, is hampered by our fragmented understanding about how the ‘occupational project’ of professionalization (Abbott, 1988) in CSR is driven on the macro-level – that is, by institutions, states and their educational systems, and corporations. As employers, companies play a central role in the professionalization of corporate professions (Muzio et al., 2011). Nevertheless, it is unclear whether – and if so, how – corporations contribute to professionalizing the occupational field of CSR by relying, for example, on professional, highly educated staff when filling their CSR vacancies just as they do in occupations such as accounting or law (Carter and Spence, 2014). There is a lack of research into what firms require from CSR practitioners in terms of education, job experience, skills, abilities and CSR expertise – for instance, in the form of specific certifications. Moreover, although scholars have extensively explored the role of institutions as determinants of CSR practices and policies (Bondy et al., 2012), our understanding of potential differences in the professionalization processes in CSR across institutional backgrounds remains limited.
This lack of research into the roles of employers in the professionalization of CSR practitioners, as well as related international differences, is worrisome for at least two reasons. First, as Dutton et al. (2001) showed, CSR managers operate in environments shaped by heterogenous and even contradictory interests and beliefs that do not always align with the social issues of CSR. Therefore, managers working in CSR face various challenges and barriers and act as ‘sellers’, promoting CSR issues to organizational decision makers (‘buyers’) who are expected to pay attention to these topics (Wickert and de Bakker, 2018). Managers of CSR who are perceived as professionals might be able to overcome such hurdles quicker because of more expertise and status linked to professionalization – hence, helping organizations to implement CSR policies and practices more smoothly (Abbott, 1988).
Second, many companies will need to professionalize their CSR in the future because pressures within their institutional contexts will force them to elaborate more and more overt and advanced CSR strategies, policies and practices. This becomes especially evident in findings of comparative CSR research. Drawing on Matten and Moon’s framework of explicit and implicit CSR (2008), research points to a trend towards CSR explicitization and hybridity (e.g. Midttun et al., 2015). It also suggests that because of a growing active societal issue focus on CSR and more official regulations on reporting and increasing pressure from stakeholders, corporations adopt more explicit CSR through innovation as well as the redefinition of traditional implicit CSR expectations in explicit CSR terms (Matten and Moon, 2020). Thus, although explicit forms of CSR have been originally identified in national contexts that in terms of Hall and Soskice’s (2001) scheme of varieties of capitalism (VoC) represent liberal market economies (LMEs), the adaption of explicit CSR in coordinated market economies (CMEs) apparently has occurred as well (e.g. Jamali and Karam, 2018). The growing explicit engagement in CSR worldwide aligns with research in the field of political economy that debates the stability and hybridization of current economic systems. Given increasing globalization, this literature challenges the long-prevailing VoC model and describes tendencies of a worldwide convergence of economies ‘on something similar to an American model’ (Hall, 2015: 3). From this ‘model’ CSR has not only emerged but also remains deeply embedded in it today as a means of maintaining legitimacy and competitiveness. Its global spread illustrates the importance of developing and communicating substantive CSR policies and practices to stakeholders and, thus, a similar need to obtain the professional staff to do so.
Drawing on the literature on the evolution of corporate professions, on explicit and implicit CSR, and on the debate on global trends of liberalization, this study explores the corporation-driven trends of professionalization in CSR. By examining longitudinal data from the US and Germany, we analyse the cross-national differences in CSR job requirements and their changes over time, thus exploring CSR explicitization via the lens of CSR professionalization. We choose a comparison of US and German data because these countries represent the historically grown, divergent institutional frameworks of LMEs and CMEs. This leads to differences in how firms manage their relationships to key stakeholders, including industrial relations, interfirm relations that govern technology transfer and markets for corporate governance that secure finance (Hall and Soskice, 2001). Because CSR is an important example of such stakeholder relations, it is likely that trends towards an explicitization of CSR can be traced by comparing these two countries over time.
Professionalization and CSR
The ‘market for virtue’ has been growing fast since the 1990s (Vogel, 2005). Firms have long been discovering that the increasing institutionalization of socially responsible corporate behaviour within society (Bondy et al., 2012) is not just a financial burden they need to adapt to, but that there is a business case to be made for CSR. Taking CSR seriously is supposed to lead to better reputations (Brammer and Pavelin, 2006), better access to highly qualified job applicants (Jones et al., 2014) and to financial success (Vishwanathan et al., 2020). Nevertheless, to take advantage of these benefits as well as to respond to the increasing national and international laws, regulations, standards and reporting requirements, companies need to develop sophisticated and modern CSR policies, programmes and activities.
A prerequisite for realizing this is the selection and deployment of professional employees, highly qualified for and educated in CSR. Professions are characterized by high-level qualifications, a delineated knowledge base, a shared professional identity, and a code of conduct policed by professional bodies that recommend best practices and inspect the conduct of members of the profession (Abbott, 1988; Ackroyd, 2016). This dominant form of organizing and controlling expert knowledge and skill that is established through closure has been scrutinized critically in recent years (e.g. Anteby et al., 2016). Scholars have challenged traditional conceptualizations of professions and professionalization, alleging their incompatibility with modern work realities such as deregulation, marketization and that today occupations act in large-scale workplaces (Švarc, 2016; Vallas and Christin, 2018). This research emphasizes the largely changing landscape of professions in which numerous new occupational fields emerge while older ones are integrated or redefined, resulting in blurred boundaries between old professions and new ‘organizational professionals’, also named ‘corporate professions’ (cf. Heusinkveld et al., 2018; Risi and Wickert, 2017). The latter have been found to differ from traditional professions in having more fragmented knowledge bases and a broader variety of services, roles and methodologies that impede the development of a sense of community and a shared professional identity (Brès et al., 2019; Muzio et al., 2011).
These new forms of expert labour and knowledge-based occupations such as IT, advertising and management consultancy have evolved new tactics and paths of professionalization (Reed and Thomas, 2021). For instance, Muzio et al. (2011) proposed four features of ‘corporate’ professionalization by which such knowledge-based occupations strive to imitate key characteristics of traditional professions. First, in contrast to traditional and more independent professions, corporate professions are characterized by organizational memberships through which firms, as well as, or instead of, individuals may join institutes and associations, hence assigning organizations a crucial role in the professionalization process (Heusinkveld et al., 2018). Second, these occupational fields search for legitimization not via public benefit, but by a focus on close client engagement – that is, by promoting and proving to clients and markets the (commercial) value delivered by their professional service providers. Third, because of their fluid, inconclusive and relational forms of knowledge bases, new occupations have established alternative forms of credentials that emphasize not an abstract body of knowledge and its possession, but (generic) competences and skills by which this knowledge is put into practice. Finally, Muzio et al. (2011) showed that corporate occupations differ from traditional professions in their jurisdictions because they involve an international focus instead of a national one, especially by membership in umbrella associations that coordinate global initiatives for the given profession.
However, despite the differences on how professionalization takes place in traditional versus new corporate professions, the objectives of this process – that is, what constitutes professionalization – remain similar. In both traditional as well as new managerial professions, professionalization still is centred around legitimization, contests for jurisdictions, closure on the basis of knowledge and expertise, as well as membership in professional associations. Thus, both new just like old professionals are linked and seek to be linked to high status, power and presumed effectiveness (Abbott, 1988; Ackroyd, 2016).
Although new management occupations and the efforts of their members in becoming professionals have been studied in various fields such as consultancy, accounting, project management and human resource management (HRM) (e.g. Carnegie and Edwards, 2001; Kipping and Kirkpatrick, 2013; Lengnick-Hall and Aguinis, 2012), knowledge about the professionalization project in CSR is, with some exceptions, still scant (Brès et al., 2019). Research so far has mainly focused on a micro-level, which is on CSR practitioners and their strategies in finding legitimacy as non-traditional professionals (Furusten et al., 2013; Gond et al., 2018; Risi and Wickert, 2017). However, studies on professionalization in CSR at a more macro-level are scarce. In particular, literature on the role of corporations in the professionalization of ‘new’ professionals such as CSR practitioners is largely underrepresented (Muzio et al., 2011). This is quite surprising, given that organizations employ these individuals and, hence, actively shape and regulate professionalization processes by their corporate policies and practices such as performance management and customer relationship management, imposing professionalization from above rather than from within (Evetts, 2011). They represent key sites and vehicles for controlling and driving large-scale professionalization projects (Suddaby et al., 2007). Therefore, our study focuses on the role of employers in the professionalization of CSR practitioners by exploring the corporate practices of employee recruitment in this occupational field. Moreover, given that organizational structures, policies and practices mirror the norms and values of their societal and political environments, our research embraces cross-national differences in the attempts of firms to promote this professionalization because of their different institutional contexts. This we will examine in the next section.
Institutional forces and cross-national differences in CSR professionalization
External factors located in an organization’s environment have been found to affect CSR significantly. Drawing on institutional theory, scholars have discussed that the rise in socially responsible corporate behaviour mainly originates in changing organizational environments in terms of institutional pressures (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), especially from core stakeholders such as consumers, employees, investors and communities (e.g. El Akremi et al., 2018). According to this research, CSR is developed for the purpose of gaining, maintaining and repairing legitimacy – that is, by establishing a fit between regulatory, cognitive and normative institutions and their corporate policies, strategies and practices (Boon et al., 2009). As Matten and Moon (2020) elaborate, institutional forces like societal interests, norms and expectations as well as regulations at the local, national and international levels, therefore shape the extent and the types of CSR activities firms choose to implement. Given the considerable increase in these institutional pressures (e.g. Flammer, 2013; Reid and Toffel, 2009), firms will soon need to intensify their CSR practices and policies and their communications. In turn, this necessitates the recruitment of highly qualified people with specialized university degrees, certified skills in CSR and appropriate international job experience.
However, CSR stakeholder identities and interests vary cross-nationally (Marano and Kostova, 2015), reflecting different institutional contexts across countries. As Hall and Soskice (2001) have elaborated in their VoC approach, the competitive advantages of firms and countries are strongly intertwined with historically shaped, country-specific institutions (Lundvall, 2007). Drawing on this research, Matten and Moon (2008, 2020) exemplified that corporational engagement in CSR varies between LMEs and CMEs. They suggested that because of institutions’ encouragement of individualism and discretion in private economic actors in LMEs, ‘expectations of corporate responsibility are more overt and focused not only on business in general but also on individual corporations’ (Matten and Moon, 2020: 16), resulting in ‘explicit’ CSR that rests mainly on voluntary corporate policies, programmes and strategies. In contrast, they labelled the type of CSR in CMEs as ‘implicit’ because expectations of socially responsible corporate behaviour in these economies are more embedded in and centred on firms in general, as initiated by (historically grounded) formal and informal institutions consisting of societal values, norms and rules that firms adapt to. Several studies found support for these differences in the type of CSR practised by firms in LMEs and CMEs (e.g. Kang and Moon, 2012; Silberhorn and Warren, 2007), but recent ones also have found evidence for a shift in CMEs to a more explicit CSR termed explicitization (Knudsen et al., 2015; Matten and Moon, 2020). Explicitization involves a more active societal focus on CSR attributed to stricter governmental regulations for reporting, and demands of stakeholders for reassurance about CSR activities as responsible investments and sourcing. In response, ‘corporations not only adopt more explicit CSR through innovation but also redefine traditional implicit CSR expectations in explicit CSR terms and, thus, develop more explicit CSR policies, strategies, and practices’ (Matten and Moon, 2020: 18). Explicitization has led to a hybridity of explicit and implicit CSR in the US and Europe with an ongoing trend towards more explicit CSR in the European context (Knudsen et al., 2015). These changes mirror a global trend of liberalization that has led some scholars to question if capitalism still comes in varieties (e.g. Hay, 2020).将这篇文章的找出作者的主要论点，解释他们从实际研究中发现了什么，从文章的任何部分找出至少一个学术知识仍然存在争议的领域。并且翻译为中文，要求500字