Unknown Knowns and Known Unknowns: Framing the Role of Organizational Learning in Corporate Social Responsibility Development

• Author: Zeynep Fortis,François Maon,Gerald Reiner,Jeff Frooman
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12130
• Published date: 01 April 2018

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 20, 277–300 (2018)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12130

Unknown Knowns and Known Unknowns:

Framing the Role of Organizational

Learning in Corporate Social

Responsibility Development

Zeynep Fortis, Franc¸ois Maon,1Jeff Frooman2and Gerald Reiner3

University of Neuchˆ

atel, Faculty of Economics and Business, Avenue du 1er-Mars 26, 2000 Neuchˆ

atel, Switzerland,

1IESEG School of Management (LEM-CNRS UMR 9221), France, 2Faculty of Business Administration and the

Philosophy Department, University of New Brunswick, Canada, and 3Department of Operations Management and

Logistics, University of Klagenfurt Austria

Corresponding author email: zeynep.fortis@unine.ch

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is now widely seen as an increasingly significant

concern for firms because of moral, relational and instrumental motives.Nevertheless,

practical aspects and challenges associated with CSR development in firms remains

only partially understood. In this setting, the organizational learning (OL) discipline

is recurrently put forward as key in the pursuit and successful development of CSR,

but the existing literature remains disjointed. This study critically reviews the existing

literature to conceptualize how research to date has approached CSR development

in terms of OL, and to provide a two-dimensional structuring framework of the role

of OL in CSR development that emphasizes key OL-related aspects supporting CSR

development and goes beyond an organization-centric viewpoint to consider not only

learning within the organization, but also from others, and with others. In particular,

the authors identify key learning processes and sub-processes and critical areas that

remain understudied. Overall, the authors propose a macro view of the work done to

date at the intersection of OL and CSR, and in doing so help make the ‘OL for CSR

development’ scholarship more recognizable as a sub-discipline.

Introduction

Scholars have studied business corporations’ so-

cial and environmental concerns for many decades

(Bowen 1953; Dodd 1932), but it is only recentlythat

corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become one

of the most vibrant areas of study and research in the

field of business and management and risen to promi-

nence on corporate agendas. Firms increasingly en-

gage in and communicate about CSR (Marano and

Kostova 2016; Morsing and Schultz 2006) with the

aim of fulfilling the economic, legal, ethical and dis-

cretionary responsibilities placed on them by society

and its members (Carroll 1979, 2008). Yet, in the

field, the development of CSR actions and policies

still appears to be problematic, and firms face im-

portant implementation-related difficulties. Various

stakeholder groups send expectations linked to multi-

faceted issues to management. These expectations of

firms’ commercial, social and environmental perfor-

mance are contextual, sometimes contradictory and,

typically,evolve over time (Carroll 2008; Matten and

Moon 2008). In addition, the boundaries of CSR have

now expanded to include concerns linked to political

responsibilities ‘that once were regarded as belonging

to government’ (Scherer and Palazzo 2011; Scherer

et al. 2009, p. 328; Vogel 2010).

In this context, the way in which the CSR idea can

be built into firms’ business activity and operations

and inform strategic decision-making processes – be-

yond the development of peripheral initiatives unre-

lated to core business activities – remains particularly

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278 Z. Fortis et al.

challenging. The development of such an approach

by firms is indeed said to require major adaptations

at the strategic, organizational and operational levels.

To achieve such adaptations, firms often need to rely

on adapted or renewed values, norms, attitudes and

competences (Maon et al. 2010; Swanson 1999).

Organizational learning (OL) – understood as a

change in the organization’s knowledge base and in

the range of potential organizational behaviors (de

Holan and Phillips 2004; Huber 1991) – and its un-

derlying processes havebeen emphasized as central to

improving the understanding of firms’ ability to inte-

grate CSR and to address ever changing CSR-related

expectations (e.g. Calton and Payne 2003; Laszlo and

Laszlo 2002). However, despite the acknowledgement

of the importance of OL in CSR development, its

role often remains implicitly referred to or only ap-

proached piecemeal by scholars. Existing theories and

CSR development models remain in need of dynamic

qualities (Lee 2008; Lindgreen et al. 2009) and do not

fully provide ‘adequate ways of thinking about how

firms learn to work with diverse stakeholders, and to

define and fulfill multiple kinds of goals and respon-

sibilities’ (Berthoin Antal and Sobczak 2004, p. 80).

Literature at the crossroads of the CSR and OL fields

of research is relatively rich, but still disjointed, and

the question pertaining to how OL and its processes

influence and contribute to foster CSR development

remains relativelypoorly and only partially answered.

In this paper, we thus propose a comprehensive

framework to address the learning processes and sub-

processes involvedin CSR development of large firms

in a more inclusive way. In this perspective, we an-

alyze academic literature on CSR development and

OL, and present an integrative conceptualization of

the role of OL in CSR development. To structure our

conceptual study,we rely, on the one hand,on Huber’s

(1991) delineation of OL processes, which include (1)

knowledge acquisition, (2) information distribution,

(3) information interpretation and (4) knowledge stor-

ing, or organizational memory, to review and catego-

rize existing contributions on the role and importance

of OL in CSR development. On the other hand, we

approach each of these central processes from a triple

perspective by addressing them in the context of (1)

CSR-related learning ‘from within’ the organization

(i.e. without others), (2) CSR-related learning ‘from

others’ and (3) CSR-related learning ‘with others’. In

doing so, we propose a structured two-dimensional

framework for researching how OL influences CSR

development, which provides a complete map and

macro-view of research at the crossroads of OL and

CSR. As a result, our conceptual effort helps to shape

‘OL for CSR development’ (hereafter CSR–OL) into

a more recognizable sub-discipline, identifies central

areas that have received much attention, and provides

avenues for future research in critical areas that are

underdeveloped to date.

Our paper is organized as follows: we first intro-

duce key theoretical elements associated with CSR,

OL and CSR–OL. Next, we present our review ap-

proach and structured two-dimensional framework.

Third, we develop a critical synthesis of our concep-

tual investigation. We then highlight a wide-ranging

future research agenda and present some limitations

regarding our research effort before we conclude.

Conceptual background

In this first section, we discuss the conceptualization

of CSR on which we rely for our investigation, before

presenting central OL-related concepts and processes

at the heart of our study. We then succinctly introduce

challenges at the crossroads of CSR and OL.

Corporate social responsibility

Defining CSR remains particularly complex. Ac-

cording to Matten and Moon (2008), this is, first, be-

cause CSR has clearly been a dynamic phenomenon

(Carroll 1999, 2008). It has a long and rich history,

and there is a still developing, massive body of liter-

ature on CSR and related notions (Crane et al. 2008;

Garriga and Mel´

e 2004). Second, CSR appears as an

‘essentially contested concept’ (Moon 2007; Okoye

2009; see Gallie 1956). That is, it can be perceived

as ‘appraisive’, as ‘it expresses a phenomenon that

is not just captured in empirical terms but is seen

as something desirable’ (Preuss 2013, p. 580), it is

‘internally complex’ as it involves balancing various

responsibilities to various members of society, and

its rules of application are relatively ‘open’. Third,

many scholars suggest that there are good reasons to

consider CSR as an umbrella term sometimes over-

lapping with some, but other times synonymous with

other, conceptions of business–society relationships

(e.g. Matten and Moon 2008; Palazzo and Scherer

2008).

In this context, for the sake of clarity and coherence

of our conceptual endeavor, and while we acknowl-

edge that ‘there are many differentways to think about

what CSR includes and what all it embraces’ (Carroll

and Shabana 2010, p. 89), we rely in this paper on

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