Homogeneity Or Heterogeneity?

To create competitive advantage,enterprises usually keep the differences with their peers.However,many enterprises tend to be similar to their peers to some extent in the field of corporate social responsibility(“CSR”).In fact,enterprises are faced with dual pressures of homogeneity and heterogeneity.On the one hand,enterprises need to keep consistent with peers to obtain the legitimacy;on the other hand,enterprises need to keep differences with peers to create competitive advantage.Therefore,in the condition of CSR,what is the decision-making basis for enterprises to dynamically balance the dual pressures of homogeneity and heterogeneity? Specifically,should enterprises adopt imitation strategy with high perceived similarity or low perceived similarity when performing CSR? Based on the perspective of stakeholders,this paper divides CSR into institutional CSR and technical CSR,and shows the interaction between CSR types and CSR imitation strategy on consumers' attitude,as well as the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of this process,based on the attribution theory,legitimacy theory.In this paper,two field experiments and three laboratory experiments are used to test the theoretical hypothesis.Based on the online data collected from field experiments,it is preliminarily verified that in the condition of technical CSR,compared with high perceived similarity,consumers have more negative attitude when implementing the imitation strategy with low perceived similarity by enterprises;while in the condition of institutional CSR,compared with high perceived similarity,consumers have more positive attitude when implementing the imitation strategy with low perceived similarity.To make the results more robust,this paper verifies that CSR type and CSR imitation strategy have interactive effects on consumers' attitude through experiment 1.Experiment 2 confirms that the influence process is mediated by legitimacy identification and altruistic attribution.Experiment 3 further verifies the moderating effect of normative pressure on this process,that is,in the presence of normative pressure,CSR type and CSR imitation strategy don't have interactive effects on consumers' attitude.The results of this paper show that to obtain more consumers' positive attitude,enterprises should choose the imitation strategy with high perceived similarity in the condition of technical CSR,while in the context of institutional CSR,enterprises should choose the imitation strategy with low perceived similarity.In terms of theoretical contribution,this paper makes an in-depth evaluation on the phenomenon of CSR imitation and deepens the research on CSR imitation.In addition,this paper finds that CSR imitation strategy affects consumers' attitude based on the whole industry and CSR is multidimensional,which contributes to the research of CSR from the perspective of consumers.Finally,this paper enriches the relevant research on the phenomenon that enterprises are forced to donate,and confirms that this phenomenon is due to the existence of normative pressure.The conclusions of this paper also provide an important guidance for the practice of CSR.