Table 2 A Snapshot of SR Actors’ in Pakistan and Theory Relevance

Sustainability Awareness

Awareness raises more and more questions that ultimately comply with the regulation.

Stakeholder’s management and institutional isomorphism.

Sustainability Interest

Sustainability interest lies in explicit and implicit CSR. Political connectedness also incurs the cost and finally intermediate with regulation and legitimacy.

Political cost and social legitimacy.

Incentive and Award

SR performance seeks competitive advantages. Socially responsible firms are willing to serve the society in response to recognition. It reduces the legitimacy gap and enhances visibility.

Signalling and legitimacy.

Foreign Influence

The foreign company follows norms and standard of the home country and very much concern with legitimacy with society. Local firms face coercive and mimetic pressures that help is the institutionalization process.

Institutional and legitimacy.

Professional Associations

Professionalism refers to normative values in the specific field. A professional person can play a significant role in the formation of standard, rules, and certification of the CSR performance that will create competitive advantages.

This argument explains the concept of institutional theory.

Regulation and Enforcement

The performance and rationality of SR broadly depend on regulation and standard. Minimum regulation is better than no regulation. The performance of regulation also depends on enforcement. Lack of awareness, interest, accountability and low control of corruption characteristics drives a mandatory SR regulation.

The concept of institutional theory explicitly and implicitly discuss regulation and standard. On the other hand, lack of enforcement arises many types of the political cost.

Guidelines and Standard

Standard and guidelines involve transparency and accountability of the organisation that creates competitive advantages, visibility and growth of the organisation. For example, most of the fortune 500 firms comply with SRI standard.

Institutional isomorphism is the process whereas, firms can mitigate different types of internal and external pressures by complying SR standard.

Perceived Benefits of Reporting

SR has a significant impact on the organisations’ performance. It reduces information asymmetry between management and agents. Information disclosure enhances transparency and accountability that reduces the societal and political threat of the firms.

SR benefits can be used a multi-stakeholder theoretical framework like; stakeholder, legitimacy, institutional, signalling and political cost. The prior study used all of these theories in the discussion of SR effectiveness.

Stakeholders’ Engagement

One of the important roles of SR is to engage diverse stakeholder in the decision making process of the firms. Mapping stakeholder and mitigating agency conflicts are critically evaluated by CSR initiatives.

Prior study commonly used stakeholder and legitimacy theory in the discussion of stakeholder engagement of SR.

Transparency

SR goal is to make the firm more transparent and accountable to the diverse stakeholders’. Firms overall performance, engagement, and opportunistic behaviour depends on how much it is transparent and how information is available. Transparent firms quickly send obedient signals to the market and stakeholders.

Most of the SR theoretical framework is driven for increasing transparency and accountability of the firms that influences SR strategy. Therefore, stakeholder, legitimacy and signalling theory may best fit with the discussion.