An Assessment of Corporate Social Responsibility Practices in the Mining and Oil and Gas Industries

Companies in the mining and oil and gas (MOG) industries operate in diverse institutional contexts, including developed and developing countries. The companies face significant environmental and social challenges ranging from pollution to community relation issues and must adhere to the requirements of several different national, international, and industry-wide institutional frameworks and standards. They have responded to these challenges by developing corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Drawing on new institutional and management standards literature, we develop and explain the concept of “regulatory scripts”, defined as the practices shared by a group of organizations in an industry in response to international frameworks and standards, which we call ‘institutional expectations’. We examine a data set of international CSR-leading MOG companies and a set of interviews with experts in these industries. Our study contributes to the existing body of literature in the field by mapping and identifying the main CSR institutional expectations in the MOG industries, identifying the regulatory scripts that appear in response to these institutional expectations across 20 firms in four areas and 29 sub-areas of CSR, and evaluating the managerial reach/scope and limits of these regulatory scripts.