”Brown Bag” research seminar with Robert Strand

On Tuesday 22th of february Robert Strand presented his forthcoming paper "The Elevated Status of Corporate Social Responsibility" with Itziar Castello as disussant.

The presentation was a part of the Brown Bag seminars at cbsCSR where faculty researchers present forthcoming papers and discuss it with fellow researchers, students and whoever is interested during lunch break. See the abstract and download the presentation below.

Abstract:

The top management team (TMT) of the corporation is an exclusive club. While traditional TMT studies have focused primarily on the individuals in the TMT, shifting focus to the position titles represented in the TMT (CEO, CFO, etc) provides insight regarding the functions considered to be of strategic and symbolic significance for the corporation. Recently a new position has joined the elite ranks of the TMT: a position dedicated to corporate social responsibility (CSR). This phenomenon can be considered indicative that CSR has achieved elevated status in the corporation of strategic and symbolic importance. In this article, I present an exhaustive review of the largest 1000 Scandinavian and U.S. public corporations to identify instances of CSR TMT members, and find that indeed, there are a significant number of CSR TMT members in corporations. Utilizing Matten & Moon's (2008) implicit/explicit CSR conceptual framework, I compare findings between Scandinavia and the U.S. and find that, to some surprise considering Matten & Moon’s framework, Scandinavian corporations have significantly more CSR TMT members than their counterparts from the U.S. I then explore potential implications of this finding and further directions for research.