Essays on the interactions of institutional voids and corporate social responsibility in Latin America

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Pacheco, Larissa Marchiori
• Orientador(a): Fleury, Maria Tereza Leme
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Vazios institucionais; Instituições formais; Instituições informais; Responsabilidade social corporativa; Multinacionais; Subsidiária
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Institutional voids; Formal institutions; Informal institutions; Corporate social responsibility; MNC; Subsidiary
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/29467

Multinational corporations (MNCs) play an essential role in the environmental and social contexts, and the worldwide pressure upon them demanding accountability for these issues calls even more attention to their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy. Since CSR presumes the interaction between organizations and several instances of a society, in order to explore the phenomenon, I recur to theories that navigate between the organizational and institutional level of analysis, considering their interaction a recursive relationship. The context of study are Latin American countries, characterized by several institutional voids that threaten business operations, but also create opportunities for agency. Our focus lies on understanding how the low institutional development of Latin America can shape firms CSR strategies, but also how firms can overcome the deleterious effect institutional voids can have on their operations through their engagement to local institutions via CSR practices. Derived from that, we question if this active role of firms in Latin America, through CSR, generates impact on countries’ formal institutions. Therefore, my aim with this thesis is to propose an integrative, multi-level empirical exercise on the interactions between formal and informal institutions and CSR activities of MNCs and other firms in different Latin American contexts. Through three complementary articles, I aim to explain how these interactions are defined and what are their outcomes in different levels of analysis with the MNC subsidiary as the main object of research. I combine different levels of analysis to explore the relationship between institutional voids and firms’ strategy, deriving sound contributions to the literatures on international business, institutions and strategy.