Gender, CSR and Feminist Organization Studies: Mapping the Theoretical Terrain

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practice increasingly addresses gender issues (e.g. Women’s Empowerment Principles Global Reporting Initiative, United Nations Global Compact, Ethical Trading Initiative), and research on gender and CSR is rapidly expanding. Yet beyond feminist ethics this scholarship often fails to explicitly reference feminist theory, and particularly that deriving from feminist organization studies (FOS). The first contribution of our paper is to address this gap by reviewing developments in feminist organization theory, and mapping their relevance to CSR. Our second contribution is to extend Garriga and Mele’s (2004) mapping of CSR theory to interrogate, and inform, extant gender and CSR scholarship. Both these exercises suggest research gaps and possible new theoretical, empirical and methodological research directions. Ultimately, we consider that really innovative contributions to gender and CSR scholarship will come from research that is well grounded in both feminist and CSR theory.