Political CSR: Doing Good or Doing Well?

Abstract

There has been recent scholarly interest in the concept of political CSR, which occurs when multinational firms engage in activities that were often perceived as functions of government. One question that has emerged is whether the motivations for such activity are normative or instrumental. In what we believe to be a first of its kind study adopting a novel approach to this research, we use linguistic analysis of texts to determine the values of firm CEOs and then use these data as a basis to determine what motivates political CSR. We find that the instrumental explanation of the activity better describes the motivations underlying this activity.