COVID‐19 and the Future of CSR Research

• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12642
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Dirk Matten,Andrew Crane

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

COVID-19 and the Future of CSR Research

Andrew Cranea and Dirk Mattenb

aSchool of Management, University of Bath; bYork University

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, governance, risk society, stakeholders,

supply chain

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) flourished pre-COVD-19 and could

reasonably claim to be one of the most widely read and cited sub-fields of management.

However, the pandemic has clearly challenged a number of existing CSR assumptions,

concepts, and practices. We aim to identify four key areas where CSR research has been

challenged by COVID-19 – stakeholders, societal risk, supply chain responsibility, and

the political economy of CSR – and propose how future CSR research should be re-

aligned to tackle them.

STAKEHOLDERS

COVID-19 has clearly illustrated who should be regarded as the most ‘essential’ stake-

holders of business. Frontline workers in healthcare, food service, delivery, and pub-

lic transportation, for example, have been widely recognized as critical for delivering

healthcare and keeping the economy going during the pandemic. Despite being widely

applauded, however, such workers have also often been exposed to infection without nec-

essary protections (Lancet, 2020), and remain poorly paid and economically vulnerable

(Lowrey, 2020). It is predicted that COVID-19 will exacerbate inequalities and lead to

continued growth in precarious work even among ostensibly ‘essential’ workers (Kniffin

et al., 2020). Also, with huge swathes of the labour force working from home there has

been greater recognition of how much economic value creation relies on overlooked and

unrewarded labour in the home and in schools, such as teaching, childcare and elder

care. As such, it is incumbent upon CSR researchers to reassess our theories of value

creation and stakeholder identification and prioritization.

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 January 2021

doi:10. 1111/jo ms.1 264 2

Address for reprints: Andrew Crane, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK (awc26@bath.

ac.uk).