Discovering a Wilderness of Regulatory Mechanisms for Corporate Social Responsibility: Literature Review

Abstract

The principle of voluntarism dominates Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) literature. However, this principle does not correspond with the empirical evidence of the role of governments in the CSR field. Moreover, studies discuss various regulatory mechanisms to stimulate CSR as used by government, businesses, and society. Since the debates on CSR governance are dispersed across various articles and lack systematic analysis, this paper adopts a structured literature review to study the variety of regulatory mechanisms that influence CSR. In order to explore these regulatory mechanisms, we have made an in-depth analysis of 186 practice-based articles published in the period from 2002 to 2011. These articles were selected from five journals in the CSR field. Based on these 186 empirical articles, (1) we detected 32 different regulatory mechanisms for stimulating CSR and promoting sustainable development; and (2) we offer a discussion of various examples of these mechanisms and an analysis of the effectiveness of their implementation. Based on this discussion, we argue in favour of a plethora of various regulatory mechanisms in support of CSR.