A recent debate in the international CSR literature has focused on the question whether CSR serves as a mirror or a substitute of country-level governance. Advocates of the mirror view highlight the role of country level institutions to drive corporate social performance (CSP) levels, whereas proponents of the substitute view find companies to become more active in light of governance gaps. We contribute to this debate by moving the focus to a sample of 264 emerging economy and developing country companies and by comparing the relationship between country-level governance and CSP based on three different CSP dimensions, namely, emissions, human rights, and community performance. Whilst we find corporate emissions performance and human rights performance to align more closely with the mirror view, there is some indication that corporate community performance—possibly traced back to the longstanding tradition of corporate philanthropy in non-Western contexts—instead acts as a substitute to fill institutional voids. We discuss implications of our findings for research and policymakers.

The extant literature on cross-national differences in approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR) has mostly focused on developed countries. Instead, we offer two inter-related studies into corporate codes of conduct issued by developing country multinational enterprises (DMNEs). First, we analyse code adoption rates and code content through a mixed methods design. Second, we use multilevel analyses to examine country-level drivers of differences in code content—specifically, elements of a country’s National Business System (NBS). We find that DMNEs are much more likely to adopt a code of conduct than their domestic counterparts; however, this does not translate into greater code comprehensiveness. We also find support for the ‘substitute view’ of CSR in developing countries, i.e. that MNEs from poorer countries and from countries with lower governance effectiveness tend to express more comprehensive commitments. However, this dynamic does not extend to a country’s labour system; instead, CSR appears here to match the efficiency of a country’s labour market, thus reflecting the ‘mirror view’ of CSR.

With this perspective paper, we seek to help open up an additional and, we believe, especially promising avenue for indigenous management research. We explore the potential for progress through the investigation of executive rationale, an institutional logic guiding managerial action and enabling strategies, structures, and formal integration mechanisms. Drawing on interviews with an elite group of executives including some of the world's most powerful managers, we illustrate variance in executive rationale across five major economies – Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States – and suggest that action and structures in these economies are broadly aligned with the respective expressions of executive rationale. We consequently hold that indigenous management research may benefit from a focus on executive rationale in particular, and we propose a concrete research agenda.