Building a Global Corporate Social Responsibility Program through Mergers and Acquisitions: A Managerial Framework

While previous studies and management conventions often adopt a finance-centric perspective of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&A or CBA), we demonstrate that CBA can be an effective platform to build a global corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, and that CSR initiatives can be customized for different locales. These CSR-CBA interconnections and customization respond to a range of stakeholder interests concomitant with both national and societal institutional factors. We develop a managerial framework for the CSR-CBA setting, and illustrate the framework with an exemplar of international expansion through acquisitions combined with an international development and implementation of CSR.