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Recent years have witnessed even more movements to support various social justice causes. For companies, it is now more important than ever to increase their investments in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Up to 70% of consumers are interested in knowing what companies are doing to address environmental and social issues (Schaeffer, 2019). Consequently, in 2021, more than 90% of S&P 500 companies have published social responsibility reports (Perez et al. 2022). CSR is defined as “actions that appear to further some social good, beyond the interests of the firm and that which is required by law.” (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001, p.117). Traditionally most CSR activities focused on diversity, sustainability, and climate change (Burns, 2021). Some research has argued that such efforts are expected from firms and they can be considered as just a cost of doing business (Barnett & Hoffman, 2008; Hoffman & Woody, 2008). However, the various stakeholders now expect companies to support a more diverse set of causes such as social equality and justice initiatives. Estimates suggest that up to 91% of consumers are willing to switch brands to one supporting a cause in some markets (Cone Communications, 2015; Cosley et al., 2021). Together, this means companies are not only under immense pressure to pursue CSR activities, but also under the pressure to pursue them using a non-traditional approach. Therefore, for companies, the question shifts from whether they should engage in CSR activities to how they should engage such activities. Thus, although many companies pursue various CSR activities, there could be a huge discrepancy in the effectiveness of such pursuits.
In addition, engaging in socially responsible activities can be expensive and require substantial investments from companies (Klassen & Whybark, 1999). Such costs are leading more companies to view CSR efforts as investments that are expected to yield indirect returns, further underscoring the importance of CSR knowledge and know-how. Tang et al., (2012) described CSR as “a process of accumulating knowledge and experience” (p.1298). This description highlights the value of CSR knowledge in helping companies to effectively and profitably engage in socially responsible activities. In this view, CSR activities are investments that require specific knowledge in order to maximize their returns. A firm can develop CSR knowledge internally, however, it can also gain this knowledge from other firms. Alliances and partnerships provide access to firms for various types of knowledge transfer (Nguyen & Islam, 2018).
Previous research investigating CSR knowledge transfer has mostly focused on the dyadic level of interfirm knowledge transfer. Yet, very little research has gone beyond the dyadic level to investigate the effect of the collective set of alliance partner firms on the CSR knowledge transfer process. It is important to investigate beyond the CSR knowledge transfer at the dyadic level because organizations are embedded in an interfirm network (Achrol & Kotler, 2022). The simplified view of interfirm relationships at the dyadic level limits our ability to examine the extent of knowledge transfer. Further, at any given time, a firm can be in an alliance with multiple partners.
This research attempts to investigate how CSR knowledge is transferred between alliance partners within the interfirm network context. This enables us to investigate how the interfirm network’s structural properties influence the CSR knowledge transfer between firms. Thus, this research aims to test how a firm’s position within its alliance network (i.e., centrality) influences such knowledge transfer. This can be accomplished by constructing an interfirm network composed of firms with their alliance partners and testing the effects of the network structural properties on knowledge transfer. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: The next section reviews the interfirm networks and knowledge transfers literature. The following section outlines the theoretical development and proposes the hypotheses. This is then followed by presenting the methodological approach. The penultimate section describes the results. The last section provides the discussion, implications, and conclusions.