University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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fitness have a more profound influence. The emotions attached to CSR also make it a
potentially important determinant of buyer power, although the signals from
consumers may be hard to interpret by firms who are working to already-established,
and probably contradictory, industry recipes.
The early coercion that we claim is typical of CSR adoption places some
organizations in an uncomfortable position, exhorted to implement ideologicallydriven
practices that have not been demonstrated to generate economic benefits.
Because coercive forces kick in early, organizations have not yet had the opportunity
to try to identify workable applications of CSR ideals. Organizations are thus placed
in an invidious position in which their early attempts to identify instrumental benefits
to those CSR values inscribed in regulatory or best practice metrics are accused of
being cynical by lobbyists such as stopgreenwashing.org. We suggest that this period
of flux may not be an opportunistic attempt by firms to capture the outcomes that
favor them but rather represents an attempt to experiment and perform the necessary
operational refinements that would in a normal institutional development path have
preceded the development of sectoral standards and ranking tables. In this
experimental context, it seems that firms are tempted to exaggerate their prowess,
which engenders a hostile and emotional reaction from wider society leading to a
retrenchment and potential reluctance to implement further CSR initiatives. Firms
that are able to recognize that this stage is experimental and hold back their
communications’ function may encounter less hostile reactions.
In conclusion, our examination of CSR practice adoption has allowed us to surface
the important role of idealism, which has been underplayed in previous explanations
of institutionalization processes. In this paper, we have examined the manner in
which the interaction between idealism and instrumentalism unfolds over time and
how the interplay between idealism and public concern affect the institutionalization
of CSR practices.