Fashion industry: is it really walking and talking CSR?

Fashion companies are progressively implementing Corporate Social Responsibility (hereafter CSR) activities as well as communicating their expectations and commitments, (Joy et al., 2012; Kozlowski, Searcy and Bardecki, 2015) in line with the growing attention expressed by consumers of fashion products towards social and environmental issues (e.g., Amatulli et al., 2018; Caniato et al., 2012; Kapferer and Michaut, 2015). CSR implementation and CSR communication are the two dimensions of CSR engagement, defined as an overarching concept of how firms combine “(1) the primarily externally facing documentation of corporate responsibilities (‘CSRtalk’) and (2) the implementation of strategies, structures and procedures in core business processes within and across divisions, functions, value chains, etc., that facilitate corporate responsibility (‘CSRwalk’)” (Wickert et al., 2016, p. 1170). Unfortunately, most of the previous studies do not sufficiently distinguish between the two dimensions of CSR engagement. Notably, there is an ongoing theoretical debate about the role of the company size as a driver to explain the different combinations of CSR communication and implementation (e.g. Baumann-Pauly et al., 2013; Morsing and Spence, 2019; Wickert et al., 2016). Nevertheless, these effects have been discussed theoretically but not yet been empirically explored. Our study aims to fill this gap by providing empirical evidence about the role of company size in the implementation and communication of CSR activities. In addition we advance that company size alone cannot explain the different combinations of CSR engagement of companies and, drawing from the two main perspectives on CSR, economic and institutional, we propose a novel framework in which we suggest that the key to account for possible differences can be found in the company’s type of business – a proxy of the way the company creates value for the market through its product offer – and its served market – a proxy of the institutional pressure that may come from the customers.