Virtue or Strategy? Weaving Social Responsability into the Coal World

This article questions the motivations of multinational corporations in adopting Social Responsibility policies in developing countries. To this end, the article compares the case of Drummond Ltd. and Carbones del Cerrejón Ltd. in Colombia. The study demonstrated that the companies respond in different ways to the institutional restrictions and pressures and that therefore their initiatives in social responsibility rise amidst specific institutional contexts. It concludes that the motivations that both multinationals have to adopt social responsibility policies are divided in two categories: internal and external. As a result, the main contribution of this article to the literature in this field was the development of a bidimensional model of Social Responsibility in which the institutional factors constitute the basis of behavior of multinational corporations.