Unveiling the conceptual structures behind Corporate Digital Responsibility: a critical realist review and theory development

Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) represents a targeted ethical approach to the issues that arise due to the unique characteristics of digital technology. Existing research provides valuable descriptive insights into CDR implementation. However, we still lack any theory that can explain CDR based on its inherent conceptual structure. We distil a list of 13 conceptual constituents based on the existing literature. We then use a critical realist lens to provide structure to these findings and generate new knowledge by inferring deeper meaning from the texts when read and understood as a wider and expanding corpus. Via this conceptual lens we surface a further set of non-empirical conceptual structures by speculating on their existence as a way to make hypothetical statements about the nature of CDR, for which evidence is only incrementally becoming available.