Abstract

In the current literature, institutional adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) governance standards is mainly understood in a binary sense (adoption versus no adoption), and existing research has hitherto focused on inducements as well as on barriers of related organizational change. However, little is known about often invisible internal adoption patterns relating to institutional entrepreneurship in the field of CSR. At the same time, additional information about these processes is relevant in order to systematically assess the outcomes of institutional entrepreneurship and to differentiate between substantive versus symbolic implementation. In this paper, we contribute a comparative intraorganizational differentiation of institutional adoption processes in the field of CSR, and we distinguish between broad and narrow organizational institutional adoption across different management functions relating to institutions of a similar type. Our study is based on a quantitative survey among members of the United Nations Global Compact Network Germany, as well as on qualitative interviews. We analyze different institutional adoption patterns and derive ten theoretical predictors of diverse institutional adoption choices and thereby inform the literatures on institutional entrepreneurship, CSR governance, and Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives. Besides our theoretical contributions, our findings serve as a source of information for practitioners engaged in CSR governance as they provide new insights into the managerial perception and assessment of different CSR standards and initiatives.