How Context Matters in Non-market Strategies: Exploring Variations in Corporate Social Responsibility-Political Activity Relationships

Managing the nexus between societal and political demands represents an important challenge for today’s organizations. While non-market strategy research debates the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate political activity (CPA), it remains unclear how and why this relationship varies across different contexts. Based on a literature review, we address this question by developing a multi-contextual framework that allows us to organize existing literature and generalize beyond it. We contribute to non-market strategy research by conceptualizing a theoretically grounded set of single contexts covering different country and industry environments, transitional contexts considering the dynamic nature of non-market environments, and cross-context settings to conceptualize environments multinational and diversified domestic firms operate in, and associate those with different CSR-CPA relationships. We further contribute to broader non-market strategy research by shedding light on the varying meanings of CSR and CPA, exploring novel epistemological and methodological perspectives, and developing a future research agenda.