Institutionalizing CSR roles: how CSR practitioners in Korea navigate weak HR systems

This study explores the underexamined role of human resource management (HRM) in supporting corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners—an emerging corporate function and career dedicated to CSR. Despite the strategic role of HRM in facilitating CSR highlighted in the wider literature linking HRM and CSR, it largely overlooks how HR practices directly support the development of dedicated CSR practitioners. We investigate how CSR practitioners in South Korea perceive organizational HR practices related to recruitment, training, and compensation, and how they respond to these perceptions in the context of their careers. Through qualitative interviews with 41 CSR practitioners in 24 multinational corporations, we found that CSR practitioners interpret inconsistent or absent HR practices as signals of marginalization, prompting proactive, compensatory actions as indicative of the status of the emerging function. The study contributes to the understanding of institutionalization and professionalization of CSR roles by integrating them more explicitly with sustainable HRM scholarship, drawing on the lived experiences of practitioners and their boundary-spanning efforts to compensate for institutional gaps. We also advance HR process theory by applying it to an emerging, loosely structured professional field—CSR. These findings underscore the need for integrated HRM support to enhance CSR practitioners.