Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the proactive role elite organizations play within-network corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance by determining whether organizations can be identified that serve as aspirational CSR role models. The assumption is that elite CSR...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the proposition that organizational policies and actions gain more legitimacy when they proactively improve (rather than reactively defend) their corporate social responsibility (CSR) standing by meeting challenges discursively mounted by...