En väg utan problem leder antagligen ingenstans. En fallstudie av de interna problem som kan uppstå vid implementering av CSR-arbete

Sammanfattning: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be seen as one of our times most complex businessrelated phenomenon. Nowadays, most companies consider a CSR strategy as a must-have, but implementing the strategy in practice seems to be easier said than done. Previous research in the CSR Management field has mostly been centered around developing a success formula for how the implementation process should be carried out. Therefore, it is a new and interesting approach to have the challenges of the implementation phase as a starting point. This study explores the implementation phase of CSR and aims to create a deeper understanding of the internal problems that are likely to be associated with the implementation. By conducting a case study on a Swedish fashion actor, the problems that arise in the CSR implementation phase will be studied, with a qualitative method. The empirical data are analyzed using a framework that decomposes internal CSR challenges into four different problems; knowledge problem, relevance problem, performance problem and a normative problem. The study presents three main findings. The first one is that the problems should be decomposed into smaller parts than the framework presents, to create a better understanding of them. The second finding is that there are both internal and external factors in a company that affect these internal problems in various ways. The last finding is that these problems interact in a complex way. This illustrates the complexity of CSR Management and is aligned with previous research. The main theoretical contribution to the field of CSR Management is in illustrating how the implementation problems are intertwined. The practical contribution is to provide a framework to be used as a tool to take on the challenges the practitioners face when implementing CSR in their daily operations. For further research, the writers suggest investigating whether this reasoning would be applicable on other management ideas than CSR or if another framework for problems could generate different insights.