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Organizer: Deborah Elizabeth Rupp; Purdue U.;
Organizer: Ruodan Shao; City U. of Hong Kong;
Organizer: Daniel Skarlicki; U. of British Columbia;

Discussant: Patrick Wright; Cornell U.;

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), defined as a firm's responsibility that goes beyond the traditional and narrow focus on maximizing profit (Davis, 1973), has received considerable attention among management scholars. While our knowledge on CSR has accumulated over years (e.g., McWilliams & Siegel, 2000), the majority of CSR research has predominantly focused on the macro-level analyses and has been conducted in North America. In short, the CSR literature is quite fragmented in terms of levels of analyses and the geographic regions where the studies were conducted, which limits our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of CSR at different levels across multiple disciplines around the world (Aguinis, 2011; Aguinis & Glavas, in press). The objective of the present symposium is to promote an integrative understanding of the implications of corporate social responsibility at different levels and across multiple disciplines in management research. First, the present symposium provides a thorough qualitative review of prior CSR research and proposes a multilevel and multidisciplinary model of CSR for future directions in this area. Second, this symposium also offers three empirical examples that represent new directions for CSR research, that have taken different levels of analyses, and that have occurred in both North American and non-North American countries. The three empirical examples include one study that explores the relationship between institutional complexity and community-level CSR performance in the United States (community level) and two studies that investigate the relationships between individual employees' perceived CSR and their reactions at work in East Asia (individual level).