Resumo

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a strategic firm’s response to institutional pressures (Oliver,1991; Jackson & Apostolakou, 2010). CSR denotes an integration of the firm’s social, ethical and environmental aspects, as well as legal requirements and stakeholder obligations with regards to business activities (Aksak, Ferguson & Duman, 2015; Batres, Miller & Pisani, 2010). In many industries, the institutional CSR pressures intensified recently, as a result of considerable social and environmental interests (Pedersen & Gwozdz, 2014).

Most CSR literature focuses on the outcomes of implementing CSR practices and researches call for more systemic studies on what motivates companies to adopt such practices (Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury, 2012). To address this questions, this paper aims to analyse if the institutional pressures and Corporate Social Responsibility are correlated, in the context of the Brazilian fashion industry. CSR in emerging economies is a poorly understood phenomenon, since much research on this subject is carried out in developed countries (Pedersen & Gwozdz, 2014; Wang et al., 2016).

Stakeholder theory and institutional theory are the dominant theories used by academics to study the forces driving and motivating CSR practice (Oliver, 1991; Pureza, 2019). Based on Pedersen and Gwozdz (2014) typology, we postulate the following hypotheses: H1a) Compliance behavior will be the most common CSR response to institutional pressures; H1b) Only a minority of firms will choose opportunity and resistance behavior and, H2 - Institutional pressures by CSR will increase the likelihood of an opportunity-seeking behavior.

Given its exploratory nature, the study describes the relation between two variables (institutional pressures and CSR). A quantitative study was carried out with a non-probabilistic sample with the Brazilian fashion industry. Data was collected from the questionnaire adapted from Pedersen and Gwozdz (2014). After the pre-test, the final number of valid questionnaires is 112, of which 59 were collected in person and 53 through virtual media. The study used the multiple regression technique, with independent variables to predict the behavior of the dependent variable.

Institutional CSR pressures and the stakeholder influence are greater when coming from clients, partners and shareholders and the CSR pressures are higher in the Nordic countries than in Brazil. Regarding the strategic response, the most frequent response is conformity, but only for specific stakeholders; for others, the most common strategic response is anticipation. This finding partially corroborates hypothesis H1a. The hypothesis H1b could not be confirmed. The results suggests that institutional pressure may be marginally accepted as a predictor of CSR behavior.

The present results clearly demonstrate that institutional pressures produce an important effect on CSR in our context. The increased institutional pressure will lead to an increase in the Strategic Answers for opportunities, whereas a low institutional pressure stimulates Strategic Responses of resistance. Our findings corroborate many propositions laid out by Pedersen and Gwozdz (2014), but the Brazilian results showed that anticipation is the most prevalent behavior. Other differences were found with respect to the influence of the stakeholders.

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