The Great Recession and Emerging Market Firms: Unpacking the Divide between Global and National Level Sustainability Expectations

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how multinational firms have an added incentive to promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to maximize profitability and adapt to the changing normative climate in a post Great Recession economy.

This chapter builds on institutional theory using contextual evidence from Mexican firms to provide insight into the varying pressures facing local and multinational enterprises in emerging markets.

This chapter highlights different sets of pressures faced by emerging market firms, both domestic and multinational. This chapter contends that emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) are incentivized to uphold CSR practices to a greater degree than domestic firms from emerging markets.

Contextual evidence for this chapter was confined to Mexican firms, which provides an opportunity for future research to be carried out from alternative emerging markets.

From a social standpoint, this chapter sheds light on the challenges of globalization and the current rift between national level policies, coinciding behavior, and global expectations. From a practical standpoint, this chapter could inform and alert CEOs and practitioners to the nuances of CSR expectations, contingent upon the sphere in which they choose to operate in.

This chapter contributes to the growing dialogue on EMNEs while highlighting the schism between national and global expectations for CSR. Further, this chapter adds to the literature on institutional theory by connecting it to the in-group and out-group literature from sociology.