BRIC Companies Seeking Legitimacy Through Corporate Social Responsibility

BRIC countries have generally gone through a process of liberalization and rapid economic growth that has allowed their major companies to acquire increasing weight in the global marketplace. However, they are still striving to achieve full legitimacy in the international arena. In a bid to close this legitimacy gap, BRIC firms are making efforts to align with the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) global norms of doing business, and recently have adopted a portfolio of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. In this paper we provide a deeper exploration into the factors that relate to BRIC firms’ adoption of different types of CSR initiatives – i.e. social policies (philanthropic projects favoring different stakeholders); publication of CSR reports; adoption of GRI standards; adherence to and financial support for the UN Global Compact. We carry out an empirical analysis on 60 large public BRIC companies, and find support for the idea that different kinds of CSR initiatives may be subject to different pressures and may serve different legitimization strategies.