Firms are facing challenges in managing corporate social responsibility (henceforth CSR) in their offshore outsourcing relationships and often fail to meet the ever increasing expectations from stakeholders. The main cause of these challenges stems from the complexity of offshore outsourcing. This thesis attempts to advance understandings of the mechanisms through which key relevant factors operate and interact to influence CSR performance outcomes. Three pieces of research taking different approaches embedded in multiple theories and levels of analysis are presented. Paper 1 advances the theoretical understanding of firm performance outcomes in cross-border inter-organisational relationships, mainly informed by institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and relational view. By specifically looking at CSR in offshore outsourcing relationships, the study enables prediction of CSR performance outcomes under institutional and inter-organisational differences. Paper 2 empirically studies a specific type of CSR failure, corporate social irresponsibility (henceforth CSiR) exposed by the media. Using an extensive amount of longitudinal data, the study demonstrates that CSR performance is an outcome of the interactions between the way firms are perceived by key stakeholders and attention to the subject matter. The paper contributes to the attention-based view, the theoretical underpinning of the paper, by separating out depth and breadth of attention conceptually and empirically. Paper 3 narrows down the sectoral context of the study to the retail industry considering its representativeness in the subject matter. Drawing on resource dependence theory, the study provides conceptual insights into a shifting paradigm from dyadic to trilateral governance. The findings of the three studies examining an identical phenomenon, but adopting different approaches and research tools, suggest CSR performance outcomes are formulated by internal and external contextual conditions and firms’ strategic choices. Overall the thesis contributes to our understanding of CSR in offshore outsourcing by unravelling the mechanisms through which these crucial factors work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:742196 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Lee, Sun Hye |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/101266/ |
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