Multi-Stakeholder Governance and Voluntary Programme Interactions : Legitimation Politics in the Institutional Design of Corporate Social Responsibility

A variety of innovative institutional forms have emerged within the context of voluntary attempts to address pressing social and environmental issues. Among such institutions, the prevailing wisdom is that those characterized as encompassing multi-stakeholder -governance are generally seen as having greater legitimacy than other forms of voluntary action, and such institutions have proliferated as a result. At the same time, business-driven programs that exclude societal stakeholder groups are believed to be increasingly emerging as competitors to multi-stakeholder-governed programs. This paper explores the relationship between these two trends and, in particular, highlights the potential for competition between multi-stakeholder and business-driven programs to lead to a diverse range of outcomes which are shaped by legitimation politics. This perspective emphasizes the open-ended and contingent nature of voluntary program interactions, and the importance of strategy and choice of voluntary programs and their participants in shaping the institutional design of programs. Drawing upon a review of prior research and an in-depth case study of business-driven voluntary programs within the European multi-product retail industry, the study shows that one key implication of legitimation politicking is a divergence between the surface appearance of the governance of programs and the programs’ actual institutional design