Corporate social responsibility in South‐East Europe: A cross‐national review

Scholars have called for the corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse to be advanced by exploring CSR in different countries. Accordingly, this review presents cross-national differences in CSR among four South-East European (SEE) countries—Kosovo, Albania, Croatia and Greece. It addresses the state of the academic literature on CSR in SEE and probes what this literature reveals about the understanding and implementation of CSR in the region. An analysis of 45 CSR-focused articles across these four SEE countries was undertaken using critical interpretive synthesis (CIS). The academic literature indicates that CSR research in SEE is at an embryonic stage. Similarly, CSR awareness in the region is lower than in other European countries. All four SEE countries demonstrate slow CSR adoption, but differences in implementation arise from their unique national contexts and levels of regional institutionalisation. This review emphasises the importance of a country's level of development for the application of CSR and highlights differences between developed (Greece and Croatia) and developing (Kosovo and Albania) countries. It proposes a typology of CSR practices across four actor levels—(1) company, (2) national, (3) regional and (4) international—and presents a conceptual framework illustrating institutional pressures at each level. Finally, it offers directions for future research to scholars interested in the region and provides guidance for SEE companies seeking to embrace CSR.