Tabla de especificaciones carrera de Ingeniería Forestal

This strand of the literature is contradicted by other studies promoting the idea that CSR fills the voids of national institutional frameworks. It tends to demonstrate how CSR is a substitute of the institutional framework in LMEs and in parallel how it does not mirror the institutional settings in CMEs (Jackson and Apostolakou, 2010). More specifically, Jackson and

Apostolakou (2010) study CSR practices across various European institutional frameworks in order to pinpoint the impact of institutional factors both at the national and sectoral levels. Based on a quantitative analysis, the authors conclude that CSR practices are principally a substitute of existing liberal capitalist institutions. More specifically, the study shows a correlation between the model of corporate governance and the rise of CSR. In countries where corporate governance mechanisms are oriented towards the satisfaction of shareholders, such as the UK, CSR practices are widely developed in order to respond to stakeholders’ demands. Contrarily, countries promoting strong stakeholders’ rights observe lower levels of CSR practices. CSR would therefore work as a substitute mode of social coordination. Based on that explanation, how can the shift from an implicit to an explicit mode of CSR be explained, or in other words, a shift towards an American way of doing CSR (Tempel and Walgenbach, 2007; Matten and Moon, 2008)? Indeed, according to the literature on comparative capitalism, varieties of capitalism do change and evolve. It seems that countries, such as Germany, which offer the characteristics of a CME, have been borrowing more and more features of LMEs. This shift in model towards the LME type followed by a change in the nature of CSR, seems to support the argument according to which CSR is a substitute to national institutions. What does this mean in practice? The more a country relies on market coordination, the more explicit CSR will become.

If these findings are put in perspective with the present study, they lead to a completely opposite picture to the one previously mentioned. According to the substitute argument, in LMEs CSR would be more present because it fills in an institutional void in terms of social coordination. In CMEs, as social coordination already exists through other forms and institutions, the need for CSR would not be that acute, hence a lower level of CSR behaviours.

In conclusion, the comparative CSR literature underlines three main points about CSR. First, national institutions influence and shape the reasons why companies engage in CSR as well as

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1973). It appears relevant for a study linking CSR and institutions accordingly to widen the definition of CSR, and not to exclude corporate behaviours that would simply abide by the law. It can be argued that the extent of a legal corpus represents another aspect about the institutional environment of a country. That fact cannot be left aside. Whether a country legislates a lot, or not, such as France, is not insignificant and should be taken into consideration. As a final point, the following caveat needs to be noted. These studies do not provide any information on the efficiency of CSR practices. The connection between the extent of CSR practices and their social efficiency and effectiveness is not clear.

2.3.3 Critical evaluation of the comparative CSR literature

The literature on comparative CSR is not exempt from limitations and gaps, which can be divided into theoretical and practical ones. From a theoretical perspective, three limitations can be identified: in relation to the literature on comparative capitalism, the real mechanisms between the company level and the national level, and the question of agency. When it comes to the practical limits of the comparative CSR literature, the aspect of CSR outcomes is rarely mentioned. Furthermore, the literature has not provided specific comparative studies comparing CSR practices.

2.3.3.1 Theoretical limitations

When CSR is explained by varieties of capitalism, two limits are particularly striking and shared in common with the literature on comparative capitalism. Whether the authors support the mirror or the substitute theory, they rely on ideal type categories, which are far from reality. There are pedagogical and theoretical advantages of resorting to ideal-types such as LME or CME. However, the use of such ideal-types in order to explain a corporate phenomenon and its consequences introduce too many uncertainties and unknowns in the explanation. Moreover, the comparative CSR literature fails to take into account the varieties of capitalism and the diversity within each category. For instance, the distinction between implicit and explicit CSR follows the divide between European countries on one hand and the USA on the other (Matten and Moon, 2008). Countries in Europe do not form a homogenous group with a similar variety of capitalism. Germany cannot be assimilated to Sweden or Italy. This limitation is even more acute for this study as two countries are to be investigated, one falling in between an ideal-types category (France). It may therefore be wondered whether the comparative capitalism literature can actually account for the link between varieties of capitalism and CSR considering this vagueness on one side of the model.

Moreover, despite emphasizing a link between the institutional framework and CSR, the literature fails to explain the real mechanisms whereby the institutional framework coupled with companies’ characteristics yield CSR practices. Gjolberg (2009b) as well as Kang and Moon (2011) highlight precisely this limit as to the absence of research on the causal mechanisms between institutional framework and CSR. The studies so far suffer from being too descriptive. Kang and Moon (2011) tried to address this shortcoming, yet they fail to convincingly unveil the mechanisms between the macro level of analysis (institutions) and the micro level (firms). Their study remains in that respect too theoretical, without any quantitative or qualitative comparative analysis. Ioannou and Serafeim (2012) offers a quantitative analysis of the impact of national institutions but on CSR performance or outcomes. They found that the most influential institutions are the political system, labour and education and the cultural system.

Examining the real mechanisms implies questioning the following phenomena. At the company level, it may be argued that specific company characteristics are more prone to trigger CSR practices. The same could be argued at the national level. Some institutions may lead more efficiently to CSR practices. At both levels, these mechanisms need to be unveiled. It is not satisfying to contend that CSR is either a substitute or a mirror of national institutions. It is necessary to know what actually happen in practice. Moreover, the role of the sector can be raised as another explanatory variable. Put differently, within a specific industry, the behaviour of competitors might have an impact on a company’s CSR practices. DiMaggio and Powell (1983, p. 148) defined an organisational field as ‘those organisations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognised area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organisations that produce similar services or products’. Within this field, organisations become more and more similar. How far are these isomorphic pressures, whether they are coercive, mimetic or normative, active in the case of CSR? Caprar and Neville (2012, p.233) advise researchers to be cautious as a ‘limited isomorphism’ would appear to take place in the case of CSR (Caprar and

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interesting perspective in the present study. They indeed advocate for the combined application of both the institutional literature and agency theory literature in order to embed corporate practices in broader social settings. Putting back agency theory at the core of CSR studies could provide another perspective on companies’ CSR behaviours and their interactions with the institutional framework.

2.3.3.2 Empirical limitations

The comparative CSR literature also suffers from empirical limitations. An evaluation of CSR outcomes on stakeholders is currently missing, as well as the right tools to measure them (Aguinis and Glavas, 2013). This lack leads to an incomplete picture of CSR insofar as it is not clearly assessed how beneficial CSR is to stakeholders. Similarly, studies comparing CSR outcomes across institutional settings are also missing. This gap leads to the impossibility of predicting which institutional framework, combined with companies’ characteristics, is more conducive to CSR efficiency.

It cannot be argued that companies have no impact on society, in particular in the domains of employment, consumption, environment, social inequality as well as the making of culture (Brammer, Jackson and Matten, 2012). How far can specific companies’ behaviours impact on society? Despite this impact on society and the growing number of studies examining CSR from a comparative perspective, only a few of them actually attempt to measure companies’ CSR performance across institutional frameworks. When it comes to measuring CSR, as previously mentioned, the majority of the literature has tried to demonstrate a connection between CSR activities and companies’ financial performance (Margolis and Walsh, 2003; Garriga and Melé, 2004; Barnett and Salomon, 2012). Regardless of the obvious difficulties of measuring outcomes, it is essential to investigate whether companies are actually doing any good when launching CSR activities depending on the national institutional framework in place. When CSR outcomes are mentioned, it can be helpful to refer to the concept of corporate social performance as defined by Wood (1991, 2010). Corporate social performance is ‘a business organisation’s configuration of principles of social responsibility, processes of social responsiveness, and policies, programs, and observable outcomes as they relate to the firm’s societal relationships’ (Wood, 1991, p. 693). For the first time in the literature, the notion of outcomes is introduced in the model of corporate social performance (Wood, 2010). There is then a manifest gap in the comparative CSR literature regarding the impact of CSR behaviours across national frameworks. Jackson & Apostolakou (2010, p. 387) highlight the fact ‘that our article provides no evidence about the relative effectiveness of CSR or other types of institutions in delivering desirable outcomes’. Gjølberg (2009b, p.

609) assumes, without demonstrating it, that ‘stronger institutions for the social embedding of the economy will result in stronger CSR performance’.

From an empirical perspective, the comparative CSR literature fails to present precise studies that compare practices and then outcomes across countries and would then support the hypothesis that the stronger the social embedding is, the wider CSR outcomes are.

There are a few studies focusing on a single country, usually displaying the characteristics of either a CME or a LME. For instance, some researches have surprisingly demonstrated that UK companies are considered as leaders of CSR in Europe, whereas Germany, for instance, seems to lag behind. It is a rather ironic finding as the UK is the symbol of market liberalism in Europe, where the mantra maximising shareholder value is at its peak (Kinderman, 2009; Jackson and Apostolakou, 2010). In order to explain the wide involvement of British companies in CSR, Kinderman (2012) defends the substitute argument. CSR would have appeared in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s to fill in the gaps created by liberalisation, privatisations and deregulations (Moon, 2004; Kinderman, 2012). Studies using in-between categories countries, such as France, cannot be found, not to mention studies comparing CSR outcomes across countries.

Finally, as highlighted by a recent study (Favotto, Kollman and Bernhagen, 2016), the overall impact of varieties of capitalism on CSR practices and reporting in companies might be overlooked, or call for further investigation, to clearly differentiate between CSR practices. Favotto et al. (2016) seem to indicate a difference between environmental issues, where no significant differences are noticed between LME and CME, and labour and human rights issues where CME offer a stronger case.

2.4 Companies’ characteristics as drivers of CSR

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However, the motivations to engage in CSR practices are complex and cannot be limited to one only.

One might look at another level of analysis and question the impact of companies’ characteristics on CSR behaviours. More specifically, is the presence of certain companies’ characteristics such as company’s size, organisation or activities a preliminary condition to CSR behaviours? Put differently, what are the company determinants of socially responsible practices?

A systematic study of the CSR literature reveals that the vast majority of the literature is preoccupied by the determinants of CSR reporting or disclosure, rather than determinants of CSR practices. For instance based on a systematic review of the existing literature, Fifka (2013) notes that between 1972 and 2011, 186 studies on the determinants of CSR reporting. A review of the literature shows that firms’ size, industry, corporate governance and activity are relevant company level factors.

2.4.1 Influence of company size on CSR practices

A first company characteristic that should be examined relates to the company size. Does company size matter when engaging in CSR projects? A common assumption reveals that the larger a company is, the more visible it is and therefore constrained to engage in CSR (Udayasankar, 2008). In contrast, small companies would be less inclined to do so. Size itself is an important characteristic as it provides companies with other advantages such as greater resources that companies can decide to devote to non-productive activities (Brammer and Millington, 2006; Amann, Jaussaud and Martinez, 2012), or better internal organization (Brammer and Millington, 2006) that small companies lack. It has been argued that corporate philanthropy, a form of CSR activity, is influenced by size, corporate visibility and industry (Brammer and Millington, 2006). It must be underlined that this contribution only covers corporate charity expenses, which may constitute a significant limitation in terms of generalisation of the results. In other words, are the results applicable to other types of CSR activities? In his study, Udayasankar (2008) presents a more nuanced explanation of the relation between CSR participation and firms’ size as he defends the theory of a U-shaped relationship. Because size would have an impact on three company attributes (visibility, resource access and scale of operation), the combination of these factors would make CSR engagement attractive for both small and large companies (Udayasankar, 2008). Nevertheless, Udayasankar’s (2008) study must be accepted with some caveats, as it is not based on any empirical investigation of this U-shaped relation between CSR engagement and firm size.

Other studies also confirm that small companies engage in CSR practices (Lepoutre and Heene, 2006; Baumann-Pauly et al., 2013; Arend, 2014), although the implementation may nevertheless differ between MNCs and SMEs (Baumann-Pauly et al., 2013).

More generally, the issue of size hides another problem when it comes to CSR implementation: the potential gap between CSR communication and real implementation. Based on a case study of Swiss companies, it seems that MNCs are better at promoting their CSR efforts than implementing real programmes, whereas SMEs put in place serious and consistent CSR measures (Baumann-Pauly et al., 2013). The original theoretical explanation offered by the scholars rests within the relative costs associated with communication and implementation (Baumann-Pauly et al., 2013).

2.4.2 Existence of an industry effect

Part of the literature has questioned the impact of the industry sector on CSR practices. For instance, it could be hypothesized that companies in high environmental impact industries would be more willing to improve their carbon footprint than companies with a lower negative impact on the environment. The literature has demonstrated that the level of CSR activities is influenced by an industry factor (Waddock and Graves, 1997; Ziegler, Schröder and Rennings, 2007; Block and Wagner, 2010; Moura-Leite, Padgett and Galan, 2012). In their study, Moura-Leite (2012), for example, try to explain the extent to which the variations between US companies in CSR practices are due to an industry or firm factor. Their study, even though geographically limited, observes quantitatively both the influence of firm and industry factors on CSR.

2.4.3 The role of corporate governance

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CSR activities (Ntim and Soobaroyen, 2013). In their study, Ntim and Soobaroyen (2013) specifically investigate the impact of the following corporate governance variables: ‘the quality of a company’s internal governance mechanisms, as measured by a CG disclosure index; ownership variables (government ownership, block ownership, and institutional ownership); and board characteristics (board size, independent directors, and board diversity)’ (Ntim and Soobaroyen, 2013, p. 471). The study finds that the type of ownership plays a role in CSR practices as well as the nature of board membership (Ntim and Soobaroyen, 2013).

A specific aspect of corporate governance has been examined in whether or not a family is running the business. Examination of the role of family business organisation has led to contradictory results (Amann, Jaussaud and Martinez, 2012). Part of the literature finds that family business tends to demonstrate a higher level of social responsibility, as family businesses are more dependent on reputation and a stronger inclination towards long-term orientation (Block and Wagner, 2010). A distinction between family ownership and family management has emerged in the literature where only the former seems to be positively correlated with CSR activities (Block and Wagner, 2010). Some studies, on the contrary, have noticed the absence of impact of a family business organisation (Dyer and Whetten, 2006; Amann, Jaussaud and Martinez, 2012). Amann et al. (2012), for instance, consider the connection between CSR and family and non-family businesses. The results of this study should be read with some care as, beyond a possible doubt of the representativeness of the sample, the research takes place in Japan. Therefore as the authors suggest, the Confucian values of the Japanese society might lead to a general treatment of employees as family members leading to suppressing the differences between family and non-family businesses (Amann, Jaussaud and Martinez, 2012).

Corporate governance is an interesting factor as some of its aspects are directly influenced by the legal system where the company operates. Corporate governance is in other words at the frontier of characteristics that are entirely dependent on the company and characteristics determined by the national institutional framework. For instance, the nature of the composition of the board may be a legal requirement.

2.5 Summary

The comparative study of CSR practices in France and the UK is situated in two main strands of literature: the comparative capitalism literature and the comparative CSR literature. The comparative capitalism literature brings clarity regarding the variety of capitalism displayed

in the UK and in France. The answer is straight-forward for the UK analysed as a LME. France remains a problematic case whose type varies depending on the selected characteristics. It is either regarded as a CME, LME-to-be or a state-led economy. Whatever the answer, the comparative capitalism literature shows the inherent differences in the type of capitalism between France and the UK. These differences in model will be later crucial when comparing and contrasting the effect of national institutions on CSR practices.

The links between the development of CSR and its forms and national institutions are partially explained by the comparative CSR literature. CSR is either viewed as a mirror or a substitute of national institutions. Finally, explaining the variations in CSR practices requires