*2.1. The Changing Nature of CSR*

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) continues to evolve [13,14] and as such, presents a major challenge to business practice [15,16]. Hack et al. [17] carried out a critical review of CSR literature from the 1950s to the 2010s and concluded that CSR began as, and continues to be, an ambiguous and contested notion. Other commentators have described the concept of CSR as 'embryonic and contestable' [18] and, without any real, clear substance or definition, meaning very different things to different people with different purposes [19]. CSR literature continues to be highly fragmented with input from different disciplines and levels of analysis [10]. The ongoing evolution of the concept has made CSR, and how it is enacted by business in society, extremely problematic. This has given rise to more substantive critiques of CSR with some authors focusing on greenwashing linked to perceived gaps between CSR communications and actions [20]

and others who present more fundamental challenges to CSR by advocating notions of corporate social irresponsibility [21] or highlighting the structural and functional limits of CSR [22]. Nonetheless, CSR remains a prominent area of academic inquiry and seems likely to continue to have practical applications within many businesses and to resonate with key stakeholder audiences internally and externally for the foreseeable future [23].

One of the leading CSR academics for over more than four decades, Archie Carroll, insists that alternative concepts such as business ethics, corporate citizenship, stakeholder management, sustainability, and the more recent Creating Shared Value (CSV) 'are interrelated and overlapping terms that have been incorporated in CSR, which [remains] the benchmark ... of the socially conscious business movement' [13] (p. 87). Carroll's Pyramid of CSR has been widely critiqued and reframed in diverse contexts by other researchers, which Carroll himself has welcomed: 'This is how theory and practice develops' [14] (p. 7). Although Frynas and Yamahaki do not consider Carroll's Pyramid to be one of the grand or middle-range theories of CSR [24], they nonetheless acknowledge that it is an established conceptual framework or typology for CSR sensemaking.

Several CSR-focused literature reviews e.g., [17,23,25,26] have examined the development of the CSR concept, not through what business does, but rather how it is discussed and defined in academic literature. In effect, those papers act as 'historical summaries' [27] reviewing secondary data which is itself often based on secondary data such as company reports. These papers e.g., [26] are all based on longitudinal literature reviews that look at the development of the CSR concept with a focus on developing a definition—the structure of the definition, the themes within the definition (e.g., [28])—rather than on the changing nature of the practice of CSR and what might be driving those changes. One exception is Kolk [26] who acknowledges that societal expectations about business behaviors have increased and that this has sometimes been linked to CSR debates.

Part of the plethora of approaches and focus on definitions may be a result of the nature of academia itself and the desire to be precise in meaning. However, the focus on definitions may also be a result of the various perspectives through which CSR is viewed; for example, are we looking for a normative definition [28] or new normative models [29]? Or are we looking from an international business perspective [26] or how CSR as a specialist topic has been framed in mainstream business journals as 'good for business' focusing on the financial bottom line [25]? Either way, fixating mainly on the definition itself is often a distraction from how CSR can help business develop responsible practices [28]. The different definitions reflect, sometimes inadvertently, the 'inevitable metamorphosis' [27] of CSR within the changing economic and cultural contexts within which business operates. There is also recent interest in business as an agent of social change reflecting transformation in external contexts [25]. Waddock [30] calls for a more challenging agenda of systemic business renewal where business transformation is about deep adaptation and change in businesses and the wider contexts within which they operate. Waddock argues that 'businesses are unlikely to transform until the surrounding ecosystem demands that they do so' [30] (p. 1). A hint of the potential for this kind of transformation arrived with the COVID-19 pandemic which has raised some fundamental questions about CSR thinking and action as Crane and Matten [31] suggest. Their future CSR research agenda advocates for: more inclusive approaches to understanding and involving stakeholders; more emphasis on global societal risk analysis; greater attention to the rights and needs of vulnerable workers in supply chains; and a reconceptualization of business as a vital part of global-local societal governance systems.

For the purposes of this article, the literature review by Sarkar and Searcy [28] is drawn upon where the authors start from the assumption that the concept of CSR continues to evolve over time and uncovers key terms as well as mapping the relationships between terms. The authors [28] identify six recurrent dimensions that underpin CSR as economic, social, ethical, stakeholders, sustainability, and voluntary, and propose the following definition that embraces these themes and resonates well with the ideas explored in this article:

'CSR implies that firms must foremost assume their core economic responsibility and voluntarily go beyond legal minimums so that they are ethical in all their activities and that they take into account the impact of their actions on stakeholders in society, while simultaneously contributing to global sustainability' [28] (p. 1433).
