Our purpose is to evaluate critically corporate social responsibility (CSR) research that has built on social exchange theory (SET), before exploring the potential of SET to expand current CSR studies, and, in so doing, explain how SET research can benefit from exploring further CSR-related phenomena. We argue that prior CSR studies focused on the individual level of analysis—the so-called ‘micro-CSR’ studies—have used yet paradoxically under-exploited the potential of SET to conceptualize the broader dynamics relating employees’ and other stakeholders’ attitudes and behaviors to broader organizational and societal dynamics. Accordingly, we offer to leverage SET to expand current CSR research and offer a research agenda cross-fertilizing CSR and SET insights. We first introduce the CSR concept, insisting on its multistakeholder, multi-issues, and multilevel nature and then review critically prior CSR research that used SET concept and theory. To address unbalances and gaps in prior research, we suggest cross-fertilizing CSR and SET insights by investigating how CSR can trigger and shape, generalized, multilevel, and multistakeholder forms of exchange. This agenda redefines CSR as complex form of social exchange while expanding the scope of reciprocity norms, resources and relationships considered in prior SET studies.
Gond et al. (Wed,) studied this question.