To make a business case for corporate sustainability, firms must be able to sell their sustainable products. The influence that firm engagement with non-governmental organizations may have on consumer adoption of sustainable products has been neglected in previous research. We address this by embedding corporate sustainability in a cosmopolitan framework that connects firms, consumers, and civil society organizations based on the understanding of responsibility for global humanity that underlies both the sustainability and cosmopolitanism concepts. We hypothesize that firms’ sustainability engagement (...) and their NGO engagement influence consumer adoption of sustainable products. Empirically, we investigate the adoption of sustainable Eco-circle products made from recycled fibers marketed by Li Ning, a China-based global sportswear brand. We apply a stepwise regression approach to test our hypotheses with paper-and-pencil survey data from 217 Chinese consumers. We find adoption to be positively associated with consumers’ sustainability attitude but not with firms’ sustainability engagement. For firm–NGO engagement, these relationships are reversed: Adoption is positively associated with firm–NGO engagement, but not with consumers’ related attitude. Our results present a picture of the Chinese context in which there is a business case for corporate sustainability if firms’ words about sustainable product strategies are supported by signals from civil society about firm deeds. The results imply that in a Chinese context, firms need to be particularly aware of the role of NGOs when hoping to be rewarded for sustainability. (shrink)

Corporations have increasingly been called on to assume responsibilities for paying fairer shares of tax, while, at the same time, governments have been repeatedly urged to develop more effective corporate tax systems to tackle tax avoidance. Therefore, institutional attributions of tax responsibility for companies seem to have features of both explicit and implicit corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, given that we lack a clear understanding of which form or forms of CSR in relation to tax are expected of companies and (...) how exactly this might be changing, we examine the evolution in institutional expectations of explicit and implicit CSR for corporate taxation. Drawing on a longitudinal content analysis of 992 news media articles from the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2021, we find that institutional expectations of corporate tax responsibility have followed a process of continuous and non-linear hybridization characterized by a pendulum-like trajectory of explicitization followed by implicitization. We discuss the implications of these findings for the theory and practice of corporate tax responsibility and the framework of explicit/implicit CSR. (shrink)