Corporate Social Responsibility in Contested Industries: A Case on Nuclear Waste Storage

The nuclear energy industry continuously needs to safeguard its license to operate or run the risk of having its operations shut down due to public pressure. Organizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives is one approach through which nuclear energy organizations can achieve this goal. Recent contributions emphasize that CSR initiatives are most valuable when they align with the core business of a firm, so-called core CSR. But for firms in contested industries it appears that core CSR actually limits managers in their ability to engage with stakeholders and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. We present a case study on a nuclear waste management project to illustrate these limitations and highlight the challenges of organizing CSR in contested industries. The study explains how a multi-level governance model was used to decide upon nine unique CSR initiatives, most of which were peripheral to the focal organizations' core businesses. The results refine the prescriptive value of core CSR fo...