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

社会学机构是“标准化的相互作用序列”，如复式记账法和内部劳动力市场。制度的核心问题是它们如何产生、扩散、巩固和解散。制度的出现，特别是，是在拟议的论文项目的核心。本研究考察了关于组织绩效意义的话语竞赛，其结果通常反映在排名、评级和指数中，这些指标试图将组织与同行进行比较。这些评价标准的变化可以成为制度化的先兆，因为它们往往先于一系列新的组织实践。例如，近年来《美国新闻与世界报道》（U.S. News and World Report）大学排名的变化，对班级规模、新生留校率和校友捐赠等大学实践产生了巨大的、几乎是直接的影响。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想法。现在有几十家机构对企业社会责任的表现进行评估，一些评论员将其描述为一场正在酝酿中的“排名战”。了解这些评估方案如何塑造组织绩效，以及组织如何反过来寻求塑造评估方案的变化是拟议研究的主要对象。研究计划是(a)确定企业社会责任评价人员的人数并将其方法的变化列入目录；(b)通过(c)大规模纵向（1991-2011）对所有罗素2000公司的自愿企业社会责任报告进行自动分析，捕捉有关这些变化的话语；并通过与(e) 24名评估人员和(d)以及罗素2000公司48名企业社会责任官员的行业分层随机样本进行半结构化访谈。基础理论将用于识别反复出现的叙事模式，将其分组为概念，将其组合为类别，最后根据企业社会责任领域绩效指标的变化绘制各种类别的生命历程。更广泛的影响企业社会责任的许多工作本质上关注更广泛的影响，通过寻求最佳实践，例如，减少污染或增加少数民族在执行董事会的代表性。这项研究通过产生一个具有广泛用途的数据集进一步推进了这一研究，例如，用于回答以下问题：(a)公司正在处理哪些社会问题以及(b)他们如何这样做。在科学发现的每个阶段，让本科生担任研究助理，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、日期编码、数据存储、参考资料管理软件、访谈方法、内容分析、学术写作和口头陈述等方面的培训。更广泛的影响也通过使研究结果容易和廉价地获得而增加。本研究中的所有编码将使用开源软件（R编程语言）。研究结果不仅将传播给学者（例如，在企业社会责任会议上），还将传播给实践者和学生。调查结果、代码本和编程脚本将以一般受众可访问和理解的格式发布在调查员的个人网站上。为了确保透明度和可重复性，研究者打算将数据集提交给ICPSR数据存储库。

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.