The Business Case for CSR: A Trump Card Against Hypocrisy?

Why do many companies talk about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in terms of a business case? We show that from a company’s perspective, using a pragmatic business case frame makes for a good impression management strategy. Building on literature about moral evaluations and hypocrisy, we propose that CEOs run the risk of raising expectations too high when talking about CSR in strongly moral terms and that audiences will see them as hypocritical when they then seem to fail to fulfill these expectations. Yet, if CEOs try not to raise expectations by not talking about CSR, they will be immediately judged unfavorably. Framing CSR in terms of the business case allows CEOs to avoid these problems, because audiences perceive CSR activities as less diagnostic of CEOs’ moral character when framed in business case terms. We find support for our theoretical framework in two experiments (total N = 1659).