**1. Introduction**

The business and society nexus in relation to social responsibility has been identified and studied in the literature using numerous terms, including sustainability, creating shared value (CSV), corporate social innovation (CSI), stakeholder management, corporate citizenship, and corporate social performance. The term chosen in this study to represent the social obligation of business vis-à-vis society is corporate social responsibility (CSR). The two main reasons this term was chosen are that it is widely encompassing, and managers and policymakers in the context of the study are familiar with the term as representative of the social obligation of the business.

Institutional theory is the conceptual lens used in this study, primarily because of its inherent contention that both contextual and institutional environments influence norms and practices of social responsibility (Koleva and Quinn 2021; Parsa et al. 2021).

Institutional theory has been criticized in the literature for predominantly focusing on the global diffusion and adoption of CSR practices and, in turn, neglecting how these practices are translated across national contexts (Sieminski et al. 2020; Filatotchev et al. 2021). To contend with this cross-national context translation issue and the identified importance of implicit CSR (Carroll 2021), a dual construct of social responsibility is adapted to the study, namely, explicit, and implicit.

Explicit social initiatives include a business organization's policies that are created deliberately to help increase societal welfare, while implicit social initiatives are a result of

**Citation:** Kobrossy, Samer, Robert Karaszewski, and Riad AlChami. 2022. The Institutionalization of Implicit and Explicit CSR in a Developing Country Context: The Case of Lebanon. *Administrative Sciences* 12: 142. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/admsci12040142

Received: 9 September 2022 Accepted: 1 October 2022 Published: 19 October 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

informal norms, values, and laws that may represent socially responsible business practices that are implied in a business context but are not well defined (Dmytriyev et al. 2021). The significance of considering this dual construct in a developing-country context ensures that implicit initiatives that may not fit into the explicit form are accounted for in the research, and these informal norms, values, and policies have been identified in the literature as vital for CSR development (Abreu et al. 2021; Masahiro 2021).

## *1.1. Problem Statement*

The main problem is that business organizations pursuing profits may create negative externalities that harm society. In the contemporary economy, these powerful and dominant institutions have substantial resources that can be utilized to alleviate social and environmental problems, consequently promoting their longevity and sustainability (Yang et al. 2021).

Therefore, the study of social responsibility and sustainability in business is an important subject in the business society nexus because it provides insight into reaching the ideal condition of seamless integration of business in society, which is a business that has a predominantly positive impact on society. The subject of socially responsible business in developing countries is pertinent because these countries contain a large proportion of the world's population and, subsequently, a large proportion of social, economic, and environmental issues.

### *1.2. Institutional Theory: A Conceptual Framework*

The significance of institutional theory in this study lies in the assumption that institutional dynamics affect the behavior of organizations (Khanal et al. 2021; Notanubun 2021). Thus, considering the contextual effects of the underlying global and local institutions will help shed light on the institutional variables that drive the managers and policymakers of business organizations in developing countries to include explicit and implicit social initiatives in their organizational mandate.

In the literature, it is evident that the CSR engagement of SMEs in developing countries tends to focus on the internal agency as the main driver of social responsibility and neglects the mutual responsiveness and interdependency between agents and institutional structures (Journeault et al. 2021). For this reason, the neo-institutional theory is considered because it recognizes that agency and organizational self-interests play a significant role in organizational adaptation to institutional environments (Manogna 2021)

Contextual institutional pressures and internal agency are the basis for the conceptual model developed in this study. It is a multidimensional model that considers institutional pressures emanating from global institutional pressures, local pressures from institutions in the national business system (Horiguchi 2021), isomorphic pressures from the organizational field (Charpin et al. 2021), internal organizational responses to institutional pressures (Oliver 1991), and how these pressures translate into explicit and implicit socially responsible initiatives. The main dimensions of the conceptual model are described briefly below.

First, global institutional pressures are the result of a multitude of global organizations that provide guidelines, metrics, and roadmaps to facilitate the proliferation of social responsibility on a global scale. Second, local institutional pressures from the national business system represent both formal institutions, such as government, associations, and civil groups, and informal groups, such as religious, cultural, and traditional norms in society (Koleva and Quinn 2021). Third, isomorphic pressures in the organizational field, as identified by DiMaggio and Powell (Charpin et al. 2021), are coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures. Fourth, internal organizational responses to institutional pressures related to organizational self-interest were best described by Oliver (1991).

These well-grounded conceptualizations within the subjects of the institutional theory were combined in this study to create a conceptual model with the goal of gaining

insight into the institutionalization of implicit and explicit obligations in the business and society interface.
