Voluntary and Implicit? The Regulation of Corporate Social Responsibility at the EU level of Governance

The paper analyses the development of the EU’s strategic discourse on corporate social responsibility (CSR) over the last two decades (1993-2016) by studying the role of the European Commission and Parliament in the formulation of various CSR regulatory documents, and their role of broker between business representatives and civil society organisations. In particular, through qualitative content analysis (QCA), are assessed the advocated degree of voluntarism and explicitness about CSR. Since the research zooms in the discursive shifts in the understanding and the social construction of CSR in the EU institutional setting, the paper applies the theory of discursive institutionalism (DI) as analytical framework. DI was chosen because it focuses exclusively on public discourse and discursive coalitions. DI has a greater ability than the other new institutionalisms to capture the dynamics of institutional change (and/or continuity) because it theorizes how and when discursive interactions enable certain actors to overcome institutional constraints. In the particular case of EU CSR regulation, the DI approach allows to analyse when and why conceptions rise, fail or are marginalized in the public policy debate, recognizing the asymmetries of power and the highly conflictual nature of public policy development. Moreover, DI helps to explain the different sets of ideas that have been prominent for a certain period of time at the expense of others. The observed shifts in the construction of CSR in the EU can be labelled evolutionary with two abrupt changes that can be explained by the economic crisis of 2008.