Is Trust a Pre-Requisite or Outcome of Corporate Social Responsibility? A Stakeholder Theoretical Perspective

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been garnering increasing momentum among academic researchers and business practitioners. Previous studies have shown that positive impacts of CSR on consumers’ buying behaviors are contingent upon a number of factors. This paper extends this stream of research and proposes that trust in a company is another important pre-requisite condition (moderator), as well as a desirable outcome, of successful CSR campaigns. In particular, we disentangle trust into two distinct concepts, pre-trust and post-trust, and drawing from stakeholder theory, we explicate the role of trust in stakeholders’ CSR evaluation process in a more fine-grained manner. A conceptual model is presented, along with its implications for research and managerial practices.