Building a coherent discourse on professionalism is a challenge for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as there is not yet an established knowledge basis for CSR, and CSR is a contested notion that covers a wide variety of issues and moral foundations. Relying on insights from the literature on micro-CSR, new professionalism, and Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991/2006) economies of worth framework, we examine the discourses of 56 CSR practitioners in South Korea on their claimed professionalism. Our analysis delineates four distinct discourses of CSR professionalism—strategic corporate giving, social innovation, risk management, and sustainability transition—that are derived from a plurality of more or less compatible moral foundations whose partial overlaps and tensions we document in a systematic manner. Our results portray these practitioners as compromise makers who selectively combine morally distant justifications to build their own specific professionalism discourse, with the aim to advance CSR within and across organizations. By uncovering the moral relationality connecting these discourses, our findings show that moral pluralism is a double-edged sword that can not only bolster the justification of CSR professionalism but also threaten collective professionalism at the field level. Overall, our study suggests paying more attention to the moral relationality and tensions that underlie professional fields.

就企业社会责任 (CSR) 实践者而言，建立连贯的专业性话语是一项挑战，因为 CSR 还没有既定的知识基础，而且 CSR 是一个有争议的概念，涵盖了广泛的问题和道德基础。依靠对微观 CSR、新专业主义以及 Boltanski 和 Thévenot (1991/2006) 价值经济框架的文献的见解，我们研究了韩国 56 位企业社会责任从业者关于他们声称的专业主义的论述。我们的分析描绘了四个不同的企业社会责任专业话语——企业战略捐赠、社会创新、风险管理和可持续发展转型。——源自多个或多或少兼容的道德基础，我们以系统的方式记录了这些基础的部分重叠和张力。我们的研究结果将这些从业者描绘成妥协制定者，他们有选择地结合道德上遥远的理由来建立自己特定的专业主义话语，目的是在组织内部和组织之间推进企业社会责任。通过揭示连接这些话语的道德关系，我们的研究结果表明，道德多元化是一把双刃剑，它不仅可以支持企业社会责任专业主义的正当性，还可以威胁到领域层面的集体专业主义。总的来说，我们的研究建议更多地关注专业领域背后的道德关系和紧张关系。