Haipeng (Allan) Chen and his coauthors, Jia Xu and Jiuchang Wei, recently published their paper, "Strategic Responses of Stigmatized Firms to Regulative Pressures through Enhanced CSR Effort" in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management (CSREM). CSREM currently has an impact factor of 4.918.

In their paper, the authors show that stigmatized firms’ effort to enhance their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reflects legitimacy considerations when faced with formal regulative pressures, but efficiency considerations when faced with informal regulative pressures. They provide empirical support by investigating publicly listed Chinese manufacturing firms’ environmental CSR performance after they are stigmatized for environmental pollution.

Their data shows that stigmatized firms show a lower CSR effort when formal regulative pressure is low and they can easily shun responsibility for polluting the environment, whereas they show a higher CSR effort when informal regulative pressure is high and they cannot easily shun responsibility for the pollution. Their findings highlight the unique insight that can be gained by studying stigmatized firms’ reactions to different types of regulative pressures as a function of responsibility dilution in an emerging economy.