Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine corporate social responsibility (CSR) content in the context of four differing national institutional arrangements for welfare. An analysis is presented on howself-reported CSR differs in content across two western welfare states (the UK and Sweden) and two emerging economies in southern Africa (South Africa and Mauritius).

Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a qualitative content analysis of the CSR self-reporting of 40 companies. This involved 10 of the largest companies incorporated in four countries, namely, Sweden, the UK, South Africa and Mauritius. The content is categorised into communityinvolvement, socially responsible production and socially responsible employee relations. For each category, an analysis is provided of the reported issues (the question of what), the geographic focus of reported issues (the question of where) and ways of working with these issues (the question of how), aswell as the extent of reporting and level of reporting (the question of how much).

Findings – The study shows that companies place focus on aspects, issues and localities in ways that differ between countries and can be understood in relation to current institutional arrangements for welfare. The content of self-reported CSR can be both complementing and mirroring the welfarearrangements. Differences in self-reported CSR agendas are particularly evident between the two western welfare states on the one hand and the two emerging economies on the other, as these represent two distinct contexts in terms of welfare arrangements.

Originality/value – This paper contributes to research on the institutional embeddedness of CSR in three ways: first, by going beyond measures of country differences in terms of extent of CSR to consider differences in CSR content; second, by focusing on the social aspects of CSR and placingthese differences in relation to welfare configurations; and third, by contributing with empirical findings on how CSR content differs across national settings and across the established/emerging economy divide.

This article examines how companies use discourse in corporate social responsibility (CSR) self-reporting to construct their engagement in social issues. Discourse is examined through the lens of ‘interpretative repertoires’ used in the reporting, which appear as recurrent habitual sets of explanations that are constitutive of CSR’s meanings. Using an innovative perspective that combines discursive institutionalism with Foucault’s notions of knowledge, power and discourse, the article examines how interpretative repertoires are used in self-reporting and how this has social consequences. The contribution to CSR research is both theoretical and empirical. Beginning with the assumption that context is an important aspect of how discourse is constructed, the empirical material includes company self-reporting from two emerging economy contexts (South Africa and Mauritius) and two advanced welfare states (Sweden and the UK). The analysis reveals the ways in which interpretative repertoires reflect how the versions of CSR are anchored in institutional contexts. How these repertoires are constructed also reveals how companies exercise power by constructing the conditions, and setting the boundaries, for company engagement in social issues.

This article examines socially responsible investing (SRI) as a form of institutional work that institutional investors engage in. The lens of institutional work is applied to a qualitative interview study on how institutional investors in Sweden take part in SRI. The article shows that the practice of SRI involves both institutional creation and maintenance, through the creation of new practices as well as the maintenance of the existing institution of financial investments. As argued in the article, this dual institutional process has implications for the meanings given to SRI. By connecting institutional creation and institutional maintenance and linking them to meaning construction, this article contributes to the research on institutional work with an innovative analysis of how a concept is given meaning through the actions of institutional investors such as banks, pension funds, insurance companies and asset management companies, as well as the individuals within these organisations.