Dr Eva Schlindwein, Stipendiary Lecturer in Management at Jesus College and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation, recently took up an additional post as a senior researcher at Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland, to conduct a research project with Professor David Risi at the same institution.

The research project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, will provide novel insights into various stages of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) implementation in the Swiss banking industry. Practically, the research will serve as a “blueprint” for CSR implementation and support evaluating and ranking firms’ CSR more effectively. Scientifically, its foci are threefold: a) the mechanisms that explain the role of CSR managers and CSR resources in implementing CSR; b) how CSR managers and CSR resources relate; and c) how a specific relationship between them results in a particular stage of CSR implementation or the transition from one stage to another.

Undertaking such a research endeavour is scientifically relevant. While scholars have described CSR managers and CSR resources as relevant for implementing CSR, studies on their joint influences on CSR implementation have provided partly mixed results, complicating our understanding of the boundary conditions of CSR implementation. The researchers will develop a detailed theoretical explanation of how the two factors jointly influence CSR implementation.

The research project includes three rounds of interviews (approx. 130 in total) with representatives of case companies and their stakeholders as well as secondary data (est. 10’000 pages, including internal documents about specific CSR projects and publicly available data on firms’ CSR implementation). After its launch in September 2022, it will run for four years. The team expect the first results by the end of the summer of 2023, after concluding with the first round of interviews.