The dual face of corporate social responsibility in social businesses: a closer look at the Colombian reality

Abstract

While the instrumental notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) focusses on what is strategic, its normative viewpoint indicates what is appropriate. This work examines how social businesses’ (SBs) employees understand the notion of CSR concerning this conceptual tension. In order to do this, a qualitative content analysis supported by text mining techniques is performed in a micro-finance institution in Colombia. Results imply that employees with a high sense of belonging tend to endorse their organizations’ CSR orientation. Also, this work identifies two distinct clusters of SB’s employees based on their notion of CSR: a sizeable instrumental group and a small normative one. This contributes to a better understanding of the CSR field by visualizing the conflict/complementarity of individual perspectives.