Sanne Frandsen

Assistant head Organization, Department of Business Administration

How CSR Practitioners reformulate their calling through social-symbolic work practices over time

Author

Sanne Frandsen
Mette Morsing
Fontana Enrico

Summary, in English

Calling has gained importance in the career and organization scholarship as a key concept to better explain the meaningfulness of work from a humanistic perspective. On the contrary, much debate remains about the ways a calling–and the meaningfulness intertwined with it–can transform over time. To respond to this problem in the literature, we investigate the calling of corporate social responsibility (CSR), thereby offering an analysis of sixty-six interviews with fifty-seven CSR practitioners working in Swedish international companies. Our paper indicates that the social-commercial tensions affecting CSR practitioners, exacerbated by the schism between their social aspirations and the commercial goals embedded in their work, prompt them to engage with social-symbolic work practices that have a bearing on the meaningfulness they assign to their CSR calling over time. As a result, we theorize three predominant sources of meaningfulness that CSR practitioners ascribe to their CSR calling–activistic purpose, win-win purpose and corporate purpose–and outline that CSR practitioners continuously reconstruct them as they engage with social-symbolic work practices throughout their early, mid and late career stage. Our article sheds new light on the existence of discrepant sources of meaningfulness behind a calling, specifying that these sources change depending on career stages. In so doing, it contributes to the career and organization scholarship as well as the literature on the professionalization of CSR.

Department/s