UN Blue and Firms’ CSR Communications: Firms’ Choice of Global Corporate Responsibility Frameworks and the Legitimacy of International Organizations

The past decades have seen a veritable explosion of global corporate responsibility (GCR) frameworks, which shape firms’ corporate social responsibility efforts. As underscored by widespread coverage of COP26 in Glasgow, there is an increasing expectation that such frameworks steer business towards sustainability. The logic being that GCRs function as blueprints, guidelines, and standards for firms to follow, including what they measure. However, recent research suggests that the proliferation of GCRs is detracting from firms’ corporate responsibility performance, as they cause confusion about what to measure, and the expanded menu offers increased opportunities for greenwashing. At the same time, there is scant understanding of firms’ choice of which, and how many, GCR frameworks they engage. In this paper, we extend organizational legitimacy theory to offer a novel explanation for firms’ choices amongst a multitude of existing GCR frameworks. These choices, we argue are shaped by two main factors: (1) firms’ efforts to manage their public reputations in the face of CSR-related reputational risks, and (2) the visibility and legitimacy of GCR issuers and their frameworks. We measure GCR framework choice by employing novel methods in natural language processing (NLP) to assess the extent to which firms mention GCR issuers and use text from GCR frameworks in their own communications, reports, and sustainability strategy documents. Our analysis draws on a novel database that brings together (1) 392 individual frameworks issued by 40 GCR actors for the period 1993-2021 and (2) a corpus comprising 4,025 CSR communications issued by 320 firms for the period 1997-2021. We find that the “UN blue” – as the UN brand is commonly referred – is perceived as the most legitimate, with the text of the UNGC frameworks and the names of various UN agencies most adorning firms’ CSR communications.