Corporate Social Responsibility as a Business Strategy for the Survival and Sustainability of Migrant Entrepreneurs

Migrant entrepreneurs operating in host‐country markets face xenophobia, capital exclusion, and institutional discrimination that threaten basic business survival, yet this context remains theoretically underspecified. Existing research frames CSR as an optional legitimacy tool in stable, developed‐country settings, overlooking contexts where institutional protection is absent. Drawing on Stakeholder Theory, Legitimacy Theory, and the Resource‐Based View, the present study interprets the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as manifesting, in the participants' accounts, as a strategy oriented towards survival rather than as a discretionary legitimacy tool and introduces moral capital as an institutional substitute in developing‐country migrant entrepreneurship. Using an exploratory qualitative design, 21 in‐depth interviews were conducted with migrant‐owned businesses in Türkiye; inductive content analysis revealed four CSR dimensions: employee‐oriented, customer‐oriented, societal, and environmental. The findings suggest that, in these participants' narratives, CSR operates less as a discretionary strategy and more as a central means through which market access, legitimacy, and resilience are pursued under structural scarcity. These findings represent an interpretive extension of the existing CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) theoretical framework, proposing that within such contexts, CSR may function more closely as a survival‐oriented mechanism than as a reputational option.