Many governments seek the private sector to meet their development goals. One possible means to enlist this support is to impose mandatory or “hard” corporate social responsibility (CSR) requirements on large companies. To shed light on how mandatory CSR could be helpful in this regard, we study the case of India, where the government has required large companies to spend a fraction of their income toward development as CSR since 2014. We analyzed the expenses of leading Indian companies and found statistically significant similarities among these companies in their spending pattern across the different categories, which we interpret as isomorphism. By looking for the government's motivation and the companies' motivations—both perceive the priorities in unmet social needs—we present a conceptual model to explain this isomorphism in CSR expenditure across different categories. The model suggests that governments may find mandatory CSR helpful to direct corporations in achieving development goals.

中文翻译：

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强制性企业社会责任如何帮助政府实现发展目标

许多政府寻求私营部门来实现其发展目标。争取这种支持的一种可能方法是对大公司施加强制性或“硬”的企业社会责任 (CSR) 要求。为了阐明强制性企业社会责任如何在这方面有所帮助，我们研究了印度的案例，自 2014 年以来，政府要求大公司将其收入的一小部分用于发展企业社会责任。我们分析了印度领先公司的费用并发现这些公司在不同类别的支出模式上存在统计学上的显着相似性，我们将其解释为同构。通过寻找政府的动力和企业的动力 动机——两者都感知未满足的社会需求中的优先事项——我们提出了一个概念模型来解释不同类别的企业社会责任支出的这种同构性。该模型表明，政府可能会发现强制性企业社会责任有助于指导企业实现发展目标。