Corporate social responsibility: practices in the Malawian tea industry.

This chapter explores the CSR actions undertaken by Eastern Produce Malawi (EPM), a subsidiary company of a multinational corporation which is based in the United Kingdom. Drawing on qualitative-based research, this chapter suggests that EPM management frames their CSR agenda through the lens of both the local and global societal challenges and expectations. This chapter shows how the contextual factors in a developing country can shape how the MNC’s global CSR standards can be translated into locally framed CSR practices. This then offers new insights into the MNC’s attempts to strike a balance between ensuring global consistency in its CSR actions and the development of CSR agenda that is responsive to local realities. The CSR agenda that EPM implements challenges the ‘one size fits all’ and the global CSR standardization thinking that sometimes dominates the CSR agenda of MNCs in different contexts.