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AbstractWe study the impact of air pollution in the city in which a firm is located on its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Our hypothesis suggests that when managers are personally exposed to bad air pollution, they feel the pain and push their firms to engage in more CSR activities. Leveraging recent announcements regarding air pollution in Chinese cities, we find evidence consistent with our "seeing is believing" hypothesis. The findings are robust to alternative metrics of CSR and air pollution and after accounting for endogeneity. Additional analysis suggests that the impact of air pollution on CSR is more salient for firms with disproportionately older, female, and highly educated managers as well as when the local city government has more stable resources or when media coverage of air pollution increases.

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a unique approach to translating a complex citation network into simple main paths. We apply this approach to explore the knowledge diffusion paths of corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature over the past 40 years. ISI Web of Science (WOS) is used as the data source for retrieving the CSR papers and their citation data. We then apply main path analysis to identify and visualize the local, global, and key‐route main paths. The local and global main paths identify those papers that play a key role in the knowledge diffusion of CSR. The key‐route main path clearly exhibits the divergence‐convergence pattern of CSR development. Although the divergence‐convergence pattern of a theory's development has been hinted at in previous literature, we propose the key‐route main path to systematically identify and exhibit it. This approach provides a useful method for researchers to figure out the development cycles of a target field. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

This paper investigates different modes of organizing for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Based on insights from organization theory, we theorize two ways to organize for CSR. "Complete" organization for CSR happens within businesses and depends on the availability of certain organizational elements (e.g., membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning). By contrast, "partial" organization for CSR happens when organizers do not have direct access to all these organizational elements. We discuss partial organization for CSR by analyzing how standards and cross-sector partnerships make selective use of organizational elements. We maintain that an important feature of the increasing institutionalization of CSR—not only within businesses but also among non-governmental, governmental, and professional actors—is the rise of partial forms of organization. We discuss the contributions to this Special Issue in the context of our theorization of complete/partial organization for CSR and outline avenues for further research.