Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Emergence of Sociological Institutions in the Field of Corporate Social Responsibility

SES-1333731 Mark Granovetter Shawn PopeStanford University社会学机构是复式会计和内部劳动力市场等“标准化交互序列”。关于机构的核心问题是它们如何出现、扩散、巩固和解散。尤其是，制度的涌现是拟议的学位论文项目的核心。这项研究考察了关于组织绩效含义的话语竞争，其结果通常反映在排名、评级和指数中，这些排名、评级和指数试图评估组织与其同行的对比。这些评价标准的变化可能是制度化的先兆，因为它们往往先于一系列新的组织做法。例如，近年来，《美国新闻与世界报道》对大学排名的改变几乎立即对大学的班级规模、新生留校率和校友捐赠等做法产生了重大影响。当前研究的案例是企业社会责任(CSR)领域，它围绕着企业应该通过超越狭隘的利润焦点或最低法律要求来承诺社会的理念。现在有数十个组织评估企业社会责任的表现，以至于一些评论人士将一场酝酿中的“排名大战”描述为“排名大战”。了解这些评价方案如何影响组织业绩，以及组织反过来又如何寻求影响评价方案的变化，是拟议研究的主要目标。研究计划是：(A)确定企业社会责任评估者群体，并对他们的方法变化进行分类；(B)通过(C)对所有罗素2000年公司人口的自愿企业社会责任报告进行大规模、纵向(1991-2011年)的自动化分析，以及通过对(E)24名评估者和(D)罗素2000公司的48名企业社会责任官员进行半结构化访谈，获取有关这些变化的论述。扎根理论将被用来识别重复出现的叙事模式，将它们分组为概念，并将它们组合成类别，最后根据企业社会责任领域的绩效指标变化绘制各种类别的生命周期图。更广泛的影响关于企业社会责任的许多工作本身都涉及更广泛的影响，例如，通过寻求最佳实践来减少污染或增加执行董事会中的少数族裔代表。这项研究通过产生一个非常普遍使用的数据集进一步推动了这项研究，例如，回答了关于(A)企业正在处理哪些社会问题以及(B)它们如何这样做的问题。将本科生作为研究助理纳入科学发现的每个阶段，将对教学和培训产生更广泛的影响。助理将接受工作流程协议、保密性维护、数据编码、数据存储、参考资料管理软件、面谈方法、内容分析、学术写作和口头陈述方面的培训。通过使研究结果更容易、更便宜地获得，也会增加更广泛的影响。这项研究中的所有编码都将使用开源软件(R编程语言)。调查结果将不仅传播给学者(例如，在企业社会责任会议上)，还将传播给从业者和学生。调查结果、代码簿和编程脚本将以普通受众可访问和理解的格式发布在调查员的个人网站上。为确保透明度和可重复性，调查员打算将数据集提交给太平洋岛屿国际委员会数据储存库。

SES-1333731Mark GranovetterShawn PopeStanford UniversitySociological institutions are "standardized interaction sequences" such as double-entry accounting and internal labor markets. Core questions about institutions are how they emerge, diffuse, entrench, and dissolve. Institutional emergence, in particular, is at the heart of the proposed dissertation project. This study examines discursive contests about the meaning of organizational performance, the outcomes of which are often reflected in rankings, ratings, and indices, which attempt to evaluate organizations against their peers. Changes in these evaluation criteria can be precursors to institutionalization, as they often precede a series of new organizational practices. Changes, for example, in recent years in how the U.S. News and World Report ranks colleges have had a large, almost immediate effect on such university practices as class size, freshmen retention, and alumni giving. The case of the current study is the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which surrounds the idea that firms should commit to society by going beyond a narrow profit focus or minimum legal requirements. Dozens of groups now evaluate CSR performance, such that some commentators describe a brewing "rankings war." Understanding how these evaluation schemes shape organizational performance and how organizations, in turn, seek to shape changes in the evaluation schemes is the primary object of the proposed study. The research plan is to (a) identify the CSR evaluator population and catalog changes in their methodologies; (b) capture discourse about these changes through (c) a large-scale, longitudinal (1991-2011), automated analysis of the voluntary CSR reports of the population of all Russell 2000 companies; and through semi-structured interviews with (e) 24 evaluators and (d) and an industry-stratified random sample of 48 CSR officers at Russell 2000 companies. Grounded theory will be used to indentify recurring narrative patterns, group them into concepts, assemble them into categories, and finally chart the life-course of the various categories against the changes performance metrics in the field of corporate social responsibility. Broader ImpactsMuch work on CSR inherently concerns broader impacts, by seeking the best practices, for example, to reduce pollution or increase minority representation on executive boards. This study furthers this research by yielding a dataset of great general use, for example, for answering questions about (a) which social issues corporations are taking up and (b) how they do so. Broader impacts in teaching and training will come from including undergraduates as research assistants in each stage of scientific discovery. Assistants will be trained in workflow protocols, confidentiality maintenance, date coding, data storage, reference management software, interviewing methods, content analysis, academic writing, and oral presentation. Broader impacts are also increased by making the findings easily and inexpensively available. All coding in this study will employ open-source software (the R programming language). Findings will be disseminated not only to scholars (e.g., at CSR conferences), but to practitioners, and to students. The findings, codebook, and programming script will be published the investigator's personal website, in a format accessible and understandable to a general audience. To ensure transparency and reproducibility, the investigator intends to submit the dataset to the ICPSR data repository.