ACQUIER Aurélien

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) is recognized as taking on various national meanings and practices, research has not sufficiently investigated how multinational companies (MNC) simultaneously achieve global CSR integration and local CSR adaptation. Building on a qualitative case study carried out at ASICS, an MNC headquartered in Japan, we show how this organizational dilemma may be solved through hybridization work, a form of institutional work performed by CSR managers in subsidiaries to combine and adapt different institutional approaches to CSR. The notion of hybridization work (1) reveals a set of practices that contribute to institutional change within organizations and (2) enriches the study of CSR organizational change and international business by showing how hybridization work leads to a greater integration between core and periphery, and by identifying the triggering factors for subsidiary initiative in CSR.