Society-centric corporate social responsibility through reflexivity: four reflexive research strategies

Reflexivity helps address descriptive and normative issues arising from the society-centric CSR debate about the role a company plays and should play in addressing the world’s most pressing societal grand challenges. However, CSR exhibits a reflexivity deficit, undermining society centrism in CSR. So, we ask: How do we systematically apply reflexivity in favor of society-centric CSR? We conduct a theoretically-informed review of the CSR literature, employing reflexivity in management scholarship to address the reflexivity deficit in CSR. Rather than capturing gaps in the literature and seeking to fill them, a theoretically-informed review introduces specific theoretical perspectives (in our case, reflexive management scholarship) into the theory and practice of the field (such as CSR), aiming to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. Based on our theoretically-informed analysis of the literature, we introduce four reflexive CSR research strategies that guide the systematic application of reflexivity in favor of society-centric CSR.