In Search of Change: Organizational Role Expectancies of CSR Professionals

Based on an integrative discourse methodology, this study examines the organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals as articulated in CSR job advertisements, focusing specifically on what organizations expect CSR professionals to change. Four types of change were identified and organized into a matrix based on the inside or outside stimuli for these changes and their expected effects, which can materialize inside or outside the organization. Specifically, the four types of change include organizational development (aligning practices with organizational values), compliance (aligning practices with external norms), social approval (changing public perceptions), and agenda setting (changing the environment). These four types of change highlight the transformative as well as the self-serving nature of the changes organizations expect CSR professionals to accomplish. On the practical side, the types of change provide insights into CSR as an occupation, as they highlight desired skills and competences of CSR professionals.


INTRODUCTION
The infrastructure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability has grown rapidly over the past decade, consisting of institutions that place pressures on companies for greater accountability, transparency, and sustainability (e.g.Waddock, 2009).At the same time, corporate stakeholders demand more sustainability from corporate processes and outcomes.Integrating these institutional and social pressures into organizations requires individuals with the motivation and competencies to implement such changes (Lindgren et al., 2011) as well as top-level support for such changes (Werre, 2003).This has resulted in an increased scholarly focus on the transformational role of individuals in organizations and their power and capabilities to implement the required changes.Especially individuals in positions dedicated to sustainability/CSR 1 have been labelled "change agents for sustainability" (e.g.Schaltegger, 2013;Hesselbarth & Schaltegger, 2014;Lozano et al., 2015;Carollo & Guerci, 2017;Salgado et al., 2018;Wickert & Risi, 2019;Wickert & de Bakker, 2018), as they are potentially the key actors in transforming organizations towards more sustainability.Previous research has examined the varied skills and competencies desired for incumbents of these positions in order for them to be able to implement these changes.At the same time, previous research has argued that the potential of these individuals to transform organizations may be limited by the tensions and conflicts they face in their work (Carollo & Guerci, 2018;Hunoldt et al., 2020;Wesselink & Osagie, 2020) and their lack of power due to their peripheral position in the organization (Risi & Wickert, 2017).Also, companies may instrumentalize CSR to maintain the status quo, potentially hindering the transformation of organizations towards sustainability (Girschik et al., 2022).Thus, the literature on CSR professionals enlightens us about individual-level practices and dynamics that may foster or limit the potential of CSR professionals to launch initiatives that can transform organizations towards more sustainability.
We seek to extend this scholarship on CSR professionals to the organizational level, considering specifically what organizations expect CSR professionals to accomplish, which we view as organizational role expectancies.The organizational level is particularly relevant, as role expectancies of managers enable or constrain their activities (Mantere, 2008).Thus, outcomes of managerial jobs are not only determined by the values, experiences, and competencies of the incumbents, but also by the "frame for the job" (Mintzberg, 1994), which consists of the purpose of the job, the vision for the respective organizational unit, and the position of the organizational unit.The organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals are therefore important drivers of the changes they are supposed to implement, which has implications for the social impact of organizations overall.In view of the discretion organizations exercise over how they address their social responsibilities towards different stakeholders (e.g.Ackermann, 1975;Matten & Moon, 2008;Phillips et al., 2010), our point of departure is the following research question: What do organizations expect CSR professionals to change?
We situate this study in the institutional context in which CSR professionals operate, i.e. a context of organizational transformations as a response to multiple institutional and stakeholder pressures, to which organizations respond based on institutional logics.Within this context, we view CSR as an occupation (cf.Abbott, 1988), because our study focuses on the work to be done.As an occupation, CSR subsumes jobs that could be variously called CSR/sustainability manager/consultant/director/specialist, spans different levels of seniority, and could be placed in a variety of pre-existing departments (e.g.HR, law, communication, marketing) or a CSR department in its own right.We examine how organizations articulate the changes they expect CSR professionals to effectuate in job advertisements for CSR positions.While incumbents of jobs generally shape and alter the frame for the job as they engage in their work (Mintzberg, 1994), job ads can be seen as a point of departure for this frame, either because the position as such is new or because the successful candidate will be new in this position.Job ads are designed to ensure a close fit between the candidates' expectations of the job and their post-hire perceptions of the job.Any major mismatch might lead to adverse outcomes, such as the disillusionment and ultimate departure of the successful candidate (e.g.Zottoli & Wanous, 2000).Because of this desired fit, job ads link CSR ambitions at the organizational level with the work of CSR professionals, who are to implement these ambitions.Based on job ads as our empirical material, we apply an integrative discourse analysis methodology (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019) in order to identify and classify the changes CSR professionals are expected to implement.Our analysis highlights that organizations expect changes aimed at organizational development, compliance, social approval, and agenda setting.This study therefore provides insights into the multifaceted role of CSR professionals in organizations and has implications for the competencies needed for such positions.
In the following sections, we outline the institutional context for CSR as our theoretical framework, which provides an understanding of the setting in which organizations create and shape CSR positions.We then review the literature on CSR professionals, their required competencies, and their experiences in such positions.After this, we explain our data collection procedure and analytical approach.We also explain the specific institutional context of Denmark, as all our data has been collected in Denmark and is therefore shaped by its national governance structures.We then present the findings obtained through the integrated discourse methodology.Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study as well as its limitations and avenues for future research.

THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF CSR
New institutional theory argues that business organizations are social institutions that need to gain and maintain legitimacy in order to survive (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991;Wood, 1991).Following this argument, businesses are expected to continuously adopt new CSR practices that demonstrate their willingness to contribute to society and reduce their social and environmental footprint.At a general level, new business practices become institutionalized through processes of standardization and homogenization (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983).Business organizations are subject to coercive pressures via regulatory bodies determining rules, regulations and procedures to be followed (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991), e.g.CSR reporting regulation particularly in European countries (e.g.France, Norway, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark) (Llena et al., 2007;Hess, 2007;Pedersen et al., 2013).Mimetic pressures inspire businesses to follow routines and practices that they take over from other organizations.This mimicry occurs particularly when companies model themselves after successful frontrunners within their industries, or from one industry to another as a standard reaction to uncertainty about how to address CSR issues (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991;Pedersen et al., 2013;Pedersen & Gwozdz, 2014).Normative pressures are rooted in the professionalization and socialization of practices adopted in particular business areas and industries (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), not only as a result of the position or power of these, but also due to an increasing embeddedness and taken-for-grantedness of particular ways in which things are done (Scott, 2001, p. 57).Professional or industry associations as well as education programs in the realm of CSR exert this kind of pressure on organizations (Matten & Moon, 2008).
At the national level, institutional pressures based on national business systems, norms and cultural behavior are important drivers for CSR changes, leading to isomorphism among companies.Businesses and organizations thus tend to draw on institutionalized practices and frameworks based on national political, legal, educational and cultural systems, norms and values (Matten & Moon, 2008;2020).With the decreasing national regulation in many countries and the globalization of CSR, international civil society groups and MNCs have stepped in and joined forces, suggesting new sets of standards and ideas for how to expand CSR practices (e.g.Kourula et al., 2019).For example, the UN Global Compact sets quasiregulative ethical standards for international trading, or the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) establishes quasi-like self-regulative governance frameworks through soft law for CSR reporting, both of which have played a key role in this global trend (Scherer & Palazzo, 2007;Scherer & Palazzo, 2011).
A shortcoming of the organizational isomorphism argument is that it neglects differences in how companies change as a response to the same institutional pressures and is therefore not sufficient to explain heterogenous organizational changes (e.g.Delmas & Toffel, 2012;Herold et al., 2018).For example, companies may respond similarly to pressures to operate more sustainably by creating dedicated CSR positions in their organizations.However, the nature of these positions in different companies may vary regarding the vision for the position, the placement in the organization, or the resources assigned.Institutional pressures may lead to such heterogeneity, as organizational leaders may interpret the same signals differently and also need to align their responses with their organizations' unique cultures.Heterogeneity may also be the result of conflicting pressures from different stakeholder groups, which force organizations to choose and prioritize among conflicting alternatives (Levy & Rothenberg, 2002).
This prioritization among conflicting pressures has been conceptualized as competing institutional logics, which are "belief systems carried by participants in the field to guide and give meaning to their activities" (Scott et al., 2000, p. 20).In a CSR context, the market logic and the sustainability logic are often seen as two fundamentally competing logics by organizations (e.g.Thornton & Ocasio, 1999;Schneider, 2015;Kok et al., 2019).A market logic is driven by a need to cut costs and increase profits, which is at the core of all business organizations (e.g.Ansari et al. 2013;Herold et al., 2018).The sustainability logic is a reflection of society's social and environmental concerns and demands and typically in opposition to the market logic, but can also be embedded in the market logic by companies with sustainable business models (Borglund et al., 2023).Companies purely driven by a market logic may address sustainability for reasons of competitiveness as a means to economic ends, for example by attending to areas consumers care about, while neglecting more serious sustainability issues that consumers may be unaware of.The market logic may therefore lead to symbolic responses to demands for sustainability, while the sustainability logic has the potential to pave the way for a genuine green transition (Schneider, 2015;Herold et al., 2018;Herold & Lee, 2017).Thus, what companies expect CSR professionals to accomplish is a reflection of the centrality of the sustainability logic in the organization.This centrality is high when the sustainability logic is deeply ingrained in a company's operations, while it is low when sustainability is only addressed in peripheral corporate activities (Herold et al., 2018).In the context of CSR professionals, the variation in the centrality of the sustainability logic entails that CSR positions in different organizations may be expected to fulfil different purposes, may be equipped with different resources and forms of authority, and may be placed differently in organizational hierarchies.Accordingly, organizational role expectancies will naturally vary among organizations.

CSR PROFESSIONALS IN ORGANIZATIONS
The growing tendency of companies to appoint CSR professionals and even sustainability officers on the top management team has been noted in previous research as a form of corporate isomorphism (e.g.Strand, 2013;Chandler, 2014;Fu et al., 2020).The increasing professionalization of CSR can also be seen in educational programs, professional associations, events, conferences, and certified training courses.This development contributes to the definition of CSR managers as a professional group (Risi & Wickert, 2017).CSR professionals in organizations are the ones to implement the organizations' CSR and sustainability agenda or inspire other organizational members to do so (e.g.Strand, 2013;Wickert & de Bakker, 2018;Risi & Wickert, 2017;Hunoldt et al., 2020).In this endeavor, they need to adapt the corporate business model to the organizational sustainability ambitions and/or the demands placed on the organization by its stakeholders (Wesselink & Osagie, 2020).CSR professionals are by their very nature boundary spanners because of their apparent need to interact with a variety of stakeholders inside and outside the organization (Seuring & Gold, 2013;Mitra & Buzzanell, 2018).Their main tasks consist therefore of communicating, acting, and building relationships (Van der Heijden et al., 2012) in order to "create momentum for CSR-related change initiatives" (Risi & Wickert, 2017, p. 620).
A variety of studies have been conducted on the desired competencies of these CSR professionals.Hesselbarth and Schaltegger (2014) argue that the required competencies of CSR managers are more demanding than that of general managers, which they demonstrate in a competence matrix, consisting of fields of CSR activities and generic sub-competencies, ranging from managerial to interpersonal ones.Wesselink et al. (2015) proposed an inventory of competencies required for CSR managers, such as systems thinking, interdisciplinarity and strategic management.Osagie et al. (2016) proposed a range of CSR-related competencies that determine how CSR managers understand, lead, and implement CSR initiatives.They classified these competencies into cognition-oriented, social-oriented, function-oriented and meta skills.Salgado et al. (2018) highlighted "intervention competence" as an indispensable skill required for CSR managers in order to be able to lead change processes towards sustainability.Finally, Barbosa and de Oliveira (2021) studied job ads for CSR professionals with computer-assisted keyword analysis and identified action skills, managerial and communication skills, project management, and leadership skills as the competencies typically expected by employers for such jobs.Overall, this stream of research has provided an understanding of the desired competencies for CSR professionals in order for them to implement transformational changes towards more sustainability.
In addition to the competencies of CSR professionals, previous research has also paid attention to the actual work done by them and the challenges they encounter in their role as change agents (e.g.Visser & Crane, 2010;Van der Heijden et al., 2012;Schaltegger, 2013;Hesselbarth & Schaltegger, 2014;Lozano et al., 2015;Carollo & Guerci, 2017;Salgado et al., 2018;van den Berg et al., 2019;Wesselink & Osagie, 2020).Visser and Crane (2010) studied the motivational drivers of CSR managers, identifying four archetypes of change agentsexperts, facilitators, catalysts and activists -who differ in how they derive meaning for their work.Wright et al. (2012) studied the identity work of CSR professionals against the backdrop of the conflicting discourses they need to navigate, arguing that the identities they form are critical for the organizational change they can bring about.Carollo and Guerci (2017) interviewed CSR managers about their roles in their organizations, highlighting how they see themselves not only as change agents inside the company but also as change agents vis-à-vis society.Carollo and Guerci (2018) further studied the paradoxical tensions CSR managers face in their work as change agents and how these tensions shape their identity construction.These tensions include being oriented towards values as well as business considerations; being an organizational insider as well as an outsider; and focusing on the short term as well as the long term.Risi and Wickert (2017), however, challenge the notion of CSR professionals as change agents, as they find that CSR managers in organizations in which CSR has become institutionalized tend to be responsible for more peripheral and routine tasks rather than CSR strategy making or its execution.Importantly, they found that the relationship between professionalization and institutionalization can be 'asymmetric' under certain conditions, e.g. when the control over the knowledge base of CSR professionals is externalized to other business functions.Wickert and de Bakker (2018) suggest that CSR managers employ a number of relational issue-selling strategies to overcome internal resistance.Related to this, Hunoldt et al. (2020) examined how CSR managers apply different logics to cope with the tensions they encounter in their work.While CSR-related changes are typically driven by CSR professionals in formally designated roles as change agents, such changes can also be initiated by internal activists who can gain influence through frame alignment processes between managers and external stakeholders (Girschik, 2019).
Taken together, this stream of research on CSR professionals as change agents has provided an understanding of the complexity of the tasks and qualifications of CSR professionals as well as the barriers that they meet in implementing change and the strategies they employ to overcome them.This scholarship on the implementation of CSR sheds light on the work of CSR professionals at the individual level, but makes little connection to the organizational-level ambitions and hence the organizational role expectancies of these positions, which is the focus of this study.

Data Collection
To understand the changes that CSR professionals are expected to implement, we collected job ads for CSR positions from the Danish job-search portal jobindex.dk,which publishes companies' job listings but also covers job postings from other job portals in Denmark and has a publicly accessible archive of job ads, starting in 2007.We collected ads for CSR jobs from 2009 to 2021, as there were no fully accessible job ads in 2007 and 2008 within our search categories.To identify CSR job postings, we searched for jobs that included the term "CSR" in the full text of the job ads.We also considered alternatives (sustainability, baeredygtighed [Engl.: sustainability], compliance), but found that this resulted in an excessive number of ads in which these terms were used in company descriptions rather than job descriptions.We therefore limited our search to "CSR".Even when using only "CSR" as a search term, there was still a considerable number of job ads that had to be eliminated manually, as they did not advertise positions for CSR professionals in the corporate sector.We narrowed down our search by selecting only the following job categories from a list of pre-defined categories: Employees and HR; Top management and board of directors; Management; Project management; Sales management; Business development; Communication and journalism; Marketing; Sales; Procurement; Office; Academic and political work.Then, we manually eliminated jobs in the public and non-profit sectors as well as consultancy jobs, student jobs and internships, as our paper focuses on professionals in the corporate sector.The job ads were written in either Danish or English.
These selection criteria resulted in a sample of 165 job ads, which include both leadership and operational/junior positions.The average number of job ads per year in our sample was 12.7 (SD=3.9).There was no discernible growth pattern regarding the number of job ads per year, as they oscillated over the years with lows in 2013 (7 ads), 2009 (8 ads) and 2020 (9 ads) and a peak in 2018 (20 ads).The job ads stem from 90 different companies, of which 46% belong to the 100 largest Danish companies (cf.Erhvervsstyrelsen, 2020).The industries these companies belong to vary widely, including for example food and beverages, retail, electronics, energy, shipping, banking, insurance, pharmaceutical, and telecom.Each company posted an average of 1.8 job ads (SD=1.6) in the period 2009-2021, with 55 companies posting only 1 ad.The maximum number of ads posted by one company over the period studied was 9. Overall, this is a unique dataset of job ads, as job search portals generally do not make expired job ads publicly available.Although we use a multi-year sample, we do not pay specific attention to the longitudinal nature of our data, as job ads are posted when a position happens to be vacant rather than periodically, which makes the timing of the job ads somewhat arbitrary.Further, companies of different sizes and industries are naturally in different maturity stages with their CSR efforts, which means that any kind of longitudinal analysis would have to take each company's specific CSR history into account.
Since our data relates to Danish companies, a brief review of the institutional context in which CSR is practiced in Denmark is in order, as it shapes CSR as an occupation in Danish companies.In Denmark, the social responsibilities of business have been driven by government involvement and regulation.The strong dominance of social democracy and the promotion of egalitarian policies in Scandinavian countries may explain to a large extent the high levels of social and environmental regulation that characterizes the overall implicit approach to CSR in Denmark (Strand & Freeman, 2015;Vashchenko, 2017;Matten, & Moon, 2008, 2020;Toft & Rendtorff, 2021).Through various corporate collaborative initiatives launched since the 1990s and Actions Plans in 2008, 2012 and most recently 2021, the Danish government has set a national CSR agenda promoting CSR as social inclusion, competitiveness, accountability and sustainable development (Vallentin, 2015;Danish Government, 2021).With the focus on national CSR priorities and plans, which characterizes the Danish as well as the Scandinavian approach to CSR in comparison with non-Scandinavian approaches (Strand et al., 2015), the Danish CSR agenda has had a significant influence on how Danish businesses understand and implement CSR.

Method of Analysis
We used an integrative discourse analysis methodology, which combines discourse analysis with elements of grounded theory (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019) to gradually move from textual realizations of organizational phenomena to higher levels of abstraction.This choice is grounded in our interest in the discourses that organizations mobilize, which are manifested in the language resources they use to describe the changes that CSR professionals are expected to effectuate.We chose this approach, as the changes expected of CSR professionals may not necessarily be stated explicitly in the job ads, but may be discernible from the discourses that are mobilized to describe the jobs.In addition, our research question is aimed at studying what CSR professionals are expected to change and therefore goes beyond what a traditional discourse analysis of job ads would reveal.Fairhurst and Putnam's (2019) integrative methodology of grounded theory and discourse analysis is intended to help researchers identify oppositions and tensions, which is, however, not the main aim of our analysis.We therefore did not work with all stages of Fairhurst and Putnam's (2019) methodology, as we are solely interested in contrasts among themes, but not in how these contrasts interact.Nevertheless, their step-by-step guide towards abstraction via constant comparisons of themes anchored in different discourses helped us to discern different types of change.To reduce the amount of data, we first condensed the job ads into broad themes, which we had identified as characteristic of the genre of job ads by closely reading our data: (1) Job type and its hierarchical and/or relational characteristics; (2) desired qualifications of the candidate; (3) formal areas of CSR associated with the job; (4) responsibilities connected to the position; (5) tasks and projects assigned to the position; (6) organizational ambitions and challenges regarding CSR; (7) organizational vision and aspirations driving the organization's CSR agenda.After this coding, it became clear that themes (1) and (3) were not relevant for our study 2 .We therefore continued our analysis with the remaining five themes and re-coded all corresponding extracts in NVivo openly into discourses the companies mobilize to address change, based on the terminology, arguments, or actions that characterize these discourses (cf.Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019).This resulted at first in seven different discourses, i.e. our first-order concepts.Table 1 (see Appendix) illustrates each first-order concept with ten examples from the data.As a second step, we examined these codings for points of contrasts via constant comparison and identified four second-order themes related to our overall question of what changes the CSR professionals are expected to effectuate.These second-order themes therefore represent four broad types of change, which CSR professionals are expected to effectuate.We formed these second-order themes based on both contrasts between and alignments among the different discourses companies draw on to talk about change.These contrasts occurred within the same job ads as well as across different job ads.Specifically, we noticed two points of contrasts, one anchored in who/what motivates the change and the other in who/what is affected by the change.These two points of contrast became our third-level dimensions, which we labelled "stimulus" and "effect".These dimensions manifest themselves either as "inside the organization" or "outside the organization".Figure 1 gives on overview of the first-order concepts, the second-order themes, and the third-level dimensions.each discourse can be found in Table 1 3 .The four types of change differ in that their stimuli are located either inside or outside the organization and that the intended effects concern the inside or the outside of the organization.We view the inside sphere of the organization as rather broad, including all practices the organization engages in or is indirectly responsible for, including also its supply chain.The outside of the organization includes all external stakeholders, i.e. customers, investors, NGOs, the public at large as well as lawmakers and other regulatory bodies.An inside stimulus represents the organization's recognition that changes are needed, whereas an outside stimulus represents phenomena outside the sphere of the organization that it decides to act upon.An inside effect denotes changes to organizational practices, while an outside effect refers to changes that do not concern organizational practices.The combination of inside/outside stimuli and inside/outside effects results in the change matrix depicted in Figure 2.These types of change occur either individually in a job ad as the only type of change a CSR professional is expected to accomplish or co-occur with the other types of change within the same job ad.Together, these types of change represent a typology of organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals.

Organizational Development (Inside-Inside)
The stimulus for organizational development is presented in the job ads as the organization's recognition that its practices need to be better aligned with its values.Accordingly, CSR professionals are expected to change the "DNA" of the organization, for example by embedding CSR in the culture and processes of the organization or generally implementing the overall vision of being a more responsible organization.The intended effects therefore variously concern the processes, results, culture or identity of the organization, which the CSR professional is expected to develop further and optimize.Three types of discourse are representative of this type of change, each of which is illustrated with ten additional examples in Table 1.

Management Speak
In all job ads, changes to organizational processes are presented as tasks for the CSR professional to be hired, without a specific goal being stated other than the organization's desire to integrate CSR better into its business processes.These internal alignments between values and practices manifest themselves in the job ads through a management and leadership discourse.A wide variety of action verbs are used to describe the changes the CSR professionals are expected to accomplish, including align, anchor, build, create, change, define, design, develop, drive, embed, establish, execute, implement, incorporate, initiate, integrate, lead, leverage, optimize, ramp up, set, shape, steer, strengthen, systematize, and translate.The practices to be changed are also manifestations of management speak, including objects of change such as action plans, culture, direction, initiatives, metrics, KPI, policies, portfolios, processes, projects, programs, relationships, results, strategies, scorecards, structures, or systems.Management speak as a discourse anchors these CSR positions firmly in the management discipline, even though the ultimate goal is to reduce the organization's social and environmental footprint on the world, which is not as linear, predictable or routine as the management speak may suggest.
The changes that these CSR professionals are expected to implement are thereby constructed as something that is successful, when it is "managed" right.Conversely, these types of organizational integration and development processes encapsulated in these tasks are to be expected for many types of managerial jobs and therefore not unique to CSR positions.However, given its prevalence in the CSR job ads, management speak is characteristic of the role of CSR professionals as organizational change agents.Related to this, the job ads also contain management speak related to internal communication, in that CSR managers are expected to convince internal stakeholders of the worthiness of these development projects, for example in phrases such as "capacity to influence and build support for your ideas and projects" or "create … understanding and acceptance".This indicates that support for the work undertaken by CSR professionals is not a given, since the job ads highlight this as a specific managerial task in this development process.

Profitability
Some job ads analyzed are quite frank about the organizations' goals of coupling CSR with economic goals.The job of the CSR professional to be hired is therefore also to change organizational practices in a way that they align with the organization's desire to increase profitability and growth at the same time.The connection between CSR and profitability is sometimes only hinted at, e.g. as in "integrate responsibility into business development".However, such connections are also formulated as very explicit tasks for the new CSR professional, for example as "turning the Group's diverse sustainability challenges into new business opportunities".Concurrently with the connection between CSR and profitability as an inside stimulus, profitability is also addressed in the description of the CSR professionals' qualifications as the ability to "understand business-driven CSR" or to "spot a business opportunity in CSR".With this profitability discourse, it becomes clear that the CSR professional to be hired is expected to implement changes that go beyond mere internal alignment or strengthening of existing practices, but are directed at a clearly profitabilitydriven effect for the organization.

Caring
The companies in our sample draw also on a discourse of caring in relation to change, which would also be very typical of other forms of CSR communication, unlike the above profitability discourse.The job ads mention changes to be implemented by the CSR professionals that are stimulated by the organizations' desire to be more responsible and sustainable.However, these articulated changes state only a general direction for the CSR professional rather than specific tasks.Examples include: "ensuring a sustainable future for our planet" or "improve lives in the communities where we work".Since these changes are not related to any outside effects, the job ads suggest that the organization intends to change its practices, because it considers this the right thing to do.

Compliance (Outside-Inside)
In the compliance theme, the stimulus for change comes as a pressure from the outside on companies to adapt their practices to the increasingly demanding changes in the CSR and sustainability compliance and regulation systems.Compliance is typically embedded in job ads as an explicit domain of qualification required by the CSR job candidates.These qualifications cover management, accounting, political science, or reporting as a foundation for responding to the increasing demands from local, national or international governors, regulators and other stakeholders.In the following, we distinguish between two forms of compliance, regulatory compliance and social compliance, based on the location of the compliance stimulus in more or less formalized regulation or in more abstract stakeholder expectations.Both forms of compliance are embedded in compliance discourses articulated through concepts such as "alignment/compliance with", "follow", "keep path with", or "live up to", but differ in that the former is legalistic in nature, while the latter is oriented towards the alignment of organizational practices with stakeholder demands.

Regulatory Compliance
The companies in our sample articulate their ambition to comply with international and/or national standards and legislation.Regulatory compliance is understood as both hard-law and soft-law initiatives established by private, civil society and potentially also governmental bodies.Regulatory compliance is articulated through an expert discourse focusing on the job candidates' level of technical and/or managerial expertise and their ability to handle compliance issues and adaptations inside the organization, which at times adds a legalistic tone to the job ads, e.g. as in "the candidate is responsible for the legal requirements regarding CSR".This focus on compliance is also reflected in job titles, such as "CSR & Compliance Manager" or "Compliance & CSR Professional".
Furthermore, compliance regulation is typically underpinned in job ads as companies' quest for candidates with insights into areas of CSR disciplines and goals to accomplish in order to bring the organization to a higher level of alignment between their practices and outside norms stipulated in national or international frameworks or standards.Those named in the job ads include the Standards of Forced Labor (ILO), the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights (UNGP), the UN Global Compact (UNGC), the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) and CSR label certifications, such as Fairtrade and Responsible Forestry (FSC).Accordingly, tasks for the positions are, for example, defined as "align the corporation with the Global Compact", or "become a member of the United Nations Global Compact in 2012".
Additional illustrative examples from the job ads can be found in Table 1.
In later years in our sample, we can see how the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have become an add-on to CSR as an occupation with the pressure on organizations to implement this new framework.For example: "operating in a way that contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)".The explicit focus on SDGs as an area of change for CSR professionals has of course only been added to the descriptions of CSR jobs after 2015 -the year of the SDG Agenda adoption (United Nations, 2015).Likewise, we can see in our sample that recent attention has been directed towards due diligence practices with a focus on new types of misbehaviors conceptualized under the umbrella of 'modern slavery'.This focus is articulated in connection with tasks and qualifications, e.g."experience with standards and organizations such as… OECD Due Diligence Guidance" or "Keeping up to date with new sustainability requirements and regulations, e.g.UK/Australian Modern Slavery Act".

Social Compliance
We identified social compliance as a more generic and informal type of compliance compared to regulatory compliance, the latter of which is based on formally established standards and frameworks.Meanwhile, social compliance denotes organizations' willingness and ambition to adapt their practices to stakeholders' norms and expectations in order to obtain or maintain their social license to operate.CSR professionals are thus often by default positioned in CSR job ads as the drivers and controllers of compliance with stakeholders' demands and expectations.With this concept, discourse markers of compliance are typically less explicit than in the regulatory compliance introduced above.Social compliance discourse typically also manifests itself through less committing and more generic job expectations, focusing on aligning practices with stakeholders' demands, concerns, priorities, requirements, interests, and expectations, as is illustrated in Table 1.The discursive framing of social compliance is thus based on adapting organizational practices in order to serve and please external stakeholders.

Social Approval (Inside-Outside)
With this type of change, the stimulus for the change comes from inside the organization in the form of the recognition that the organization's CSR activities are not sufficiently known outside the organization or not perceived in the manner desired.The effect of the change thus concerns the public perceptions of the organization.The CSR professionals' tasks therefore include communicating, raising awareness of and promoting the CSR achievements of the organization to outside stakeholders with a view to improving the organizational reputation or the corporate brand, both of which we subsume under the notion of social approval as the accomplishment expected by the organization.The tasks the CSR professional is expected to carry out focus on promoting the organization's CSR strategy and initiatives and on managing different communication forms and tools designed to disseminate favorable information about the organization.We identified a promotional discourse in the job ads that is characterized by expressions such as persuade, convince, make visible, create visibility, change the narrative, build dialog, or create a strong profile.Specifically, social approval is evidenced by task descriptions such as "enhancing the awareness of X's commitment to CSR" or "optimize the company's ….reputation".Communicating the CSR achievements of the organization to outside stakeholders also involves tasks that focus on communicating the value of the brand in order to promote the organization as a socially responsible organization, e.g. as in "strengthening X's brand identity" or "balance longer term focus on brand building, with short term demands".Additional examples can be found in Table 1.The promotional discourse illustrates that CSR professionals are expected to act as ambassadors for the brand to stakeholders outside the company, e.g. by applying different forms of marketing and corporate communication.This promotional discourse present in our data is also attributable to the fact that some of the job ads advertise joint positions for CSR and communication or marketing, as evidenced by job titles such as "Communications & CSR Director" or by department names such as "Brand, CSR & Marketing", neither of which was an unusual combination in our dataset.

Agenda Setting (Outside-Outside)
This type of change was far less prevalent in the dataset compared to the other three, but is noteworthy nonetheless.As an outside-outside type of change, agenda setting does not concern the practices of the organization as an object of change.Rather, CSR professionals are expected to impact the political or public CSR agenda either to create a more advantageous legal and political environment for the organization or to prevent disadvantageous developments in this environment.Thus, neither the stimulus nor the effect concerns organizational practices.The term 'agenda' is in fact used multiple times in the job ads, when agenda-setting tasks are described explicitly, e.g. as in "set the political agenda" or "set the agenda for digitization".In addition, the expected skills of the successful candidate also include the general ability to "set something on the agenda".More subtly, such changes are framed as "input to relevant … political discussions" or as liaising with relevant external stakeholder groups.A more defensive type of change that is characterized by this political discourse is the CSR professional's task to "influence legal requirements and standards", from which it can be gleaned that this influence would have to be in the interest of the organization by pre-empting unfavorable future legislation or loosening up existing legislation.Thus, we see a political discourse in the job ads, in that the CSR professional is expected to engage with affairs outside the direct sphere of influence of the organization, through which the organization is constructed as a political actor in society, as can also be seen in the examples in Table 1.

DISCUSSION
In this study, we examined the organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals as articulated in job advertisements, focusing specifically on what organizations expect CSR professionals to change.Our analysis of job ads for CSR positions suggests that organizations expect CSR professionals to accomplish a multitude of change initiatives, which differ based on who/what motivates these changes and who/what is affected by these changes.The job ads differ in how many of these four types of change they include and in which combinations.This variety can be seen as an outcome of varying levels of centrality of the sustainability logic, which again may depend on CSR maturity, firm size, or industry.The combinations of changes included in the job ads suggest that the four types of change are compatible at the organizational level and may even reinforce each other.For example, a stronger adherence to organizational values or external norms may make it easier to change public perceptions of the organization.Conversely, a changed environment may make it easier to adhere to external norms.However, this compatibility at the organizational level does not rule out that CSR professionals encounter tensions in implementing these changes, as they need to collaborate with individuals or entities within the organization that may pursue goals that are in conflict with the changes that CSR managers are expected to implement (e.g.Risi et al., in press;Hunoldt et al., 2020).
The focus of organizational development as an inside-inside change is on aligning organizational practices with the values upheld by the organization.For this type of change, we did not observe any other motives in our data than the organization's desire to do so, but we cannot rule out that the organization has other motives that were not articulated in the job ads.The changes articulated as part of the organizational development type of change concern organizational processes and are therefore potentially transformational changes that can help to address society's grand challenges, clearly depending on the scope and ambition level of the envisioned changes.
The focus of compliance as a type of change is on adapting practices to outside expectations, demands, and requirements.Our findings related to this type of change demonstrate a strong organizational insistence on navigating both generally acknowledged and emerging institutional frameworks and standards as a key qualification of CSR job candidates.The companies' focus on this issue in our job ads may well document a strong and continuous ambition amongst businesses to keep their social license to operate and strengthen their legitimacy -not least through reference to the most prestigious institutionalized international frameworks and initiatives, e.g. the UNGP, GRI and the SDG Agenda.This could be explained by the strong shift we have seen in recent years where governments are returning to their traditional but adapted roles as regulators (Kourula et al., 2019).In Denmark, where our data was collected, sustainability reporting is for example mandatory, and international frameworks are generally seen as supporting tools.Reporting can also be seen in light of research demonstrating that in the past decade, in particular, and in parts of the world, legislative and regulatory action has begun to focus on disclosure and transparency (Carroll, 2021;Matten & Moon, 2020).Thus, organizations expect CSR professionals to support this priority in government and among businesses in general on "the ethical requirements that cement the relationship between business and society" (Garriga & Melé, 2004, p. 60).Such requirements are based on principles that express the right thing to do, which is the principle dominating the organizational development type of change mentioned above, or the necessity to maintain a license to operate, which is the principle that dominates the compliance type of change (Garriga & Melé, 2004).
Outside effects of the changes to be implemented concern the external perceptions or the external environment, i.e. social approval and agenda-setting, both of which are self-serving types of changes that are not aimed at transforming organizations towards more sustainability, but are nevertheless elements of CSR as an occupation.The finding regarding social approval aligns with previous work on the role of CSR communication for changing stakeholders' perceptions, through which organizations acquire legitimacy (e.g.Stewart, 2003;Schlegelmilch & Pollach, 2005;Golob et al., 2017;Nielsen & Thomsen, 2018).This might be different, if organizations approach and conceive this communication as two-way transformational communication (Morsing & Schultz, 2006), intended to gather insights from stakeholder dialogues in an ongoing and sense-giving and sense-making process, which could then lead to higher levels of stakeholder approval (Schoeneborn et al., 2020).
Below, our results are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications, limitations and suggestions for future research.

Theoretical Implications
Theoretically, this study extends previous studies in the area of CSR as an occupation in a context of organizational change by enlightening us about organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals, which we conceptualized as four types of change in Figure 2. The insights about organizational role expectancies furnished by this study can help to provide a more nuanced understanding of organizational change ambitions and to develop strategy guidelines and managerial practices that can be used constructively by organizations undergoing CSR change projects.As we outline below, our study makes specific contributions to the institutional perspective on CSR as well as the literature on competencies for CSR and sustainability managers.
First, our findings extend previous research on the institutional perspective of CSR (e.g.Delmas & Toffel, 2012;Schneider, 2015;Herold & Lee, 2017;Herold et al., 2018).Our study highlights how CSR positions as similar organizational responses to institutional pressures for more sustainability are framed differently in different organizations, which can be explained by the dominance of different institutional logics in different organizations (e.g.Herold et al., 2018).The 'stimuli' dimension in our change matrix can be seen as a reflection of varying levels of the centrality of the sustainability logic across companies, reflecting companies' various goals and motivations to implement genuine or symbolic changes towards more sustainability (Herold & Lee, 2017;Schneider, 2015).The inside effects (i.e.changes to organizational practices) in our matrix are the result of a market and/or a sustainability logic, which provides the motivation for companies to align their practices with their values or relevant outside norms.The outside effects, meanwhile, suggest a pure market logic as the main driver, as the changes are more self-serving in the form of more favorable perceptions or a more favorable external environment.These different effects of the changes that CSR professionals are expected to implement are a reflection of how companies apply the market and the sustainability logics, which may be more compatible for some organizations and less compatible for others (Borglund et al., 2023), depending for example on idiosyncratic factors such as organizational culture, leadership vision, business models, or stakeholder demands (Zimmermann, 2020).
Second, the four types of change we have identified provide insights into CSR as an occupation, which is inextricably linked to change, as is illustrated by the multidimensional nature of organizational role expectancies we presented in our analysis.The 'effect' dimension of our change matrix extends the literature of the competencies of CSR professionals, but does so by taking departure in the actual "frame for the job" (Mintzberg, 1994) designed by companies.Meanwhile, the extant literature on the desired competencies of CSR professionals has studied such competencies based on a literature synthesis, interviews and workshops with CSR managers, and alumni surveys (e.g.Hesselbarth & Schaltegger, 2014;Wesselink et al., 2015;Osagie et al., 2016;Salgado et al., 2018).Given that job ads are intended to create a close fit between the job candidates' expectations of the job and their post-hire perceptions of the job (e.g.Zottoli & Wanous, 2000), CSR job ads are insightful regarding organizational role expectancies and turned out to be quite revealing in our study regarding self-serving corporate ambitions.Thus, our study of job ads complements the understanding of CSR competencies obtained from previous studies on self-reported data from CSR managers with a view of competencies grouped according to organizational role expectancies.
The types of change we identified and the competencies needed to implement them vary across organizations, depending on the organization's ambition for the position as well as on the placement of the position in the departmental structure.The CSR jobs advertised were found to be combined with other functions in the organization, most typically communication, which has implications for the accomplishments expected of these professionals but also the skills desired.Therefore, our study further highlights that CSR does not draw on a common body of knowledge.Rather, it draws on multiple knowledge and skill domains in addition to CSR as such, specifically management, marketing, accounting (measurement), and communication, as has also been pointed out in previous research (e.g.Hesselbarth & Schaltegger, 2014;Brès et al., 2019).Our analysis extends this diversity of domains, given that organizational development and compliance clearly draw on the management, accounting and to some extent the legal domain, while social approval is anchored in marketing and communications, and agenda setting draws on a background in public affairs or political science.Thus, contextual knowledge (cf.Risi & Wickert, 2017) and an ongoing effort to develop the organization's CSR activities, initiatives and processes seems to be a part of the CSR professionals' everyday life.Thus, our findings point in the direction that CSR knowledge is expert knowledge that is practiced in combination with other areas of knowledge.
Third, the findings also extend previous research that emphasizes the role of CSR professionals as boundary spanners (Seuring & Gold, 2013;Mitra & Buzzanell, 2018;Carollo & Guerci, 2017) and change agents for sustainability (e.g.Hesselbarth & Schaltegger, 2014;Lozano et al., 2015;Salgado et al., 2018).As our findings specify, the diversity of tasks to be carried out by CSR professionals makes it clear that their role is to be both inside and outside change agents (cf.Carollo & Guerci, 2017), as they are expected to change practices inside the organization (viz.organizational development, compliance) as well as generate selfserving outcomes outside the organization (viz.social approval, agenda setting).However, our study shows that CSR professionals are expected to be change agents, yet not necessarily change agents for corporate sustainability.They are also expected to implement changes in the realm of communication or public affairs, which do -by themselves -not contribute to corporate sustainability.Thus, not all organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals lead to the transformational changes needed in the corporate sector.This may be an area of concern, since the organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals clearly determine the outcome and speed of the green transition so badly needed for future generations.If companies place more value on competencies that support the (self-serving) outside effects, i.e. social approval and agenda setting, and place CSR positions in departments focused on these kinds of accomplishments (e.g.communication or public affairs), the potential of CSR positions to deal with the grand societal challenges might not become fully realized.
Further, our findings suggest that it can be questioned whether CSR can be seen as an occupation in its own right because of its multidisciplinarity (cf.Brès et al., 2019).Hence, there is a potential risk that the control over the knowledge base of CSR professionals is externalized to other business functions, e.g.communication (Risi & Wickert, 2017).However, the question whether CSR as an occupation is "threatened" by other business functions, e.g.communication (Pollach et al., 2012), which may take over the control of the CSR knowledge base, once a specific change project has been finished (Risi and Wickert, 2017), is an open question.On the other hand, our study also shows that organizations expect CSR professionals to accomplish changes together with other business functions, which has also been studied by Risi et al. (in press).Thus, we may conclude that organizations expect the CSR professional to fulfill either a generalist function or an expert function, which may depend on the size of the company as well as its CSR maturity level.
From a macro-level perspective, the four types of change that CSR professionals are expected to implement can be seen as attempts to gain and maintain legitimacy as a response to social and institutional demands for more sustainability.The four types of change relate to the ways in which businesses generally obtain legitimacy (Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975;Suchman, 1995).Following Dowling and Pfeffer (1975), organizations obtain and maintain legitimacy when (1) their practices and goals conform to prevailing definitions of social norms and systems, (2) they manage to change the definitions of social norms in congruence with their practices, or (3) they associate themselves with well recognized institutions, values or symbols.Superimposing these strategies on our framework of inside/outside stimuli-effects broadens up our institutional perspective by viewing our findings in light of organizational legitimation practices in a change context.First, companies may increase organizational legitimacy by coupling organizational practices to internal values and culture, stimulating the feeling of a strong organizational identity towards employees.Similarly, our social approval type of change fits this legitimization strategy, as legitimacy is sought through external communication strategies in an attempt to promote the organization as possessing a strong CSR identity and values.Second, the compliance type of change can be seen as a substantial willingness and effort amongst businesses to try to gain legitimacy by conforming to appropriate norms in their stakeholder environment.Further, our agenda-setting type of change relates to the redefinition of social norms, where businesses obtain legitimacy in the future by lobbying with highly powerful institutions to shape governance structures.

Practical Implications
The CSR job ads in our sample reflect to a large degree the interdisciplinarity of responsibilities, competences and tasks emphasized in existing research on CSR professionals (e.g.Risi et al., in press;Brès et al., 2019;MacDonald & Shriberg, 2016;Thomas et al., 2013).As pointed out by Risi & Wickert (2017), CSR professionals are conceptualized as 'allrounders' in organizations and are expected to cope with and combine a large variety of CSR and sustainability areas and domains.Accordingly, CSR professionals are expected to possess concrete practice-oriented skills such as negotiation and coalition building along with more generic skills such as reporting, oral and written communication, as well as teambuilding and ethical value leadership as a prerequisite for leading CSR and sustainability change processes in the strategic direction desired by organizations (e.g.MacDonald & Shriberg, 2016;Thomas et al., 2013).The high diversification of CSR skills and competences required for CSR professionals was also reflected in our sample of job ads confirming the idea of the CSR occupation as a heterogenous and multidisciplinary work field.
On the practical side, our study confirmed that there is no such thing as the "typical CSR professional", as each CSR position is embedded in the unique "frame" stipulated by the organization at a given time (Mintzberg, 1994), which may be a reflection of variations in institutional logics.This entails that the experience a CSR professional has gained in a CSR position in one organization cannot necessarily be applied to a new position in another organization, unless the types of change pursued are the same.This would suggest that recruiters need to pay attention to the types of change organizations expect CSR professionals to implement and search for the right candidate based on the competences needed to implement specifically these changes.Following the multidimensional perspective of CSR professionals and the pervasive character of CSR and sustainability in society, the CSR job landscape may therefore call for adding more basic knowledge into CSR and sustainability programs, but also a higher degree of specialization of CSR competences and tasks in the future to match candidate profiles with organizational role expectancies of CSR positions.
As a response to the increasing need for highly skilled CSR professionals, the pressure to make CSR and sustainability compulsory elements in management and business education programs is growing (Schaltegger, 2013).Without intending to establish a one-to-one relationship between the actual practices of CSR professionals and the change perspectives of CSR professionals pointed out in our study, our contribution can be seen as a set of pointers towards key streams of competencies that CSR and sustainability students should acquire during their studies to respond to future challenges of CSR and sustainability.This does not indicate that CSR and sustainability education is likely to drive the transformation of CSR as an occupation, as the types of change identified in this study clearly suggest that sustainability ambitions are also driven by a market logic.Following Barbosa and de Oliveira (2021), university curricula should adapt to industry's needs in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice.As our findings suggest, those education programs dedicated specifically to CSR need to take the multifaceted nature of organizational role expectancies into account and take a broad-based view of CSR as change in designing their curricula, enabling graduates to implement the four types of change envisioned by organizations by educating CSR generalists.Alternatively or additionally, education programs in the social sciences, such as general management, accounting, law, communication, or political science, should consider integrating CSR into their curricula in order to make graduates specialists for specific roles within CSR, such as organizational CSR process consultants, compliance specialists, CSR communication specialist, or public affairs specialists.

Limitations and Future Research
This study is not without limitations.First, analyzing job ads for CSR positions means that we confine our analysis to designated CSR positions, while excluding the role of other relevant functions in the organization that are critical for CSR implementation (cf.Risi et al., in press).In particular HR could act as a support function for initiating CSR-related changes inside organizations or for building organizational capacities for transformation and change (cf.Jamali et al., 2015;Buller & McEvoy, 2016).Similarly, the communication function may advertise positions for professionals that are to implement changes regarding a more CSRoriented reputation without highlighting this CSR focus in the job ads.In addition, it is unknown which and how many companies fill CSR positions with candidates from inside the organization, without advertising the position externally.Furthermore, our dataset of CSR jobs encompasses entry-level, specialist, and senior positions, which may have implications for the scope of the changes expected from each position, yet not necessarily for the types of change the candidate is expected to implement or contribute to.
A second limitation lies in the heterogeneity of companies regarding their CSR maturity, which precludes us from studying the development of CSR as an occupation over time.Even though we collected a multi-year sample of job ads, this dataset does not enable us to systematically study the development of CSR, although this is a fairly new occupation that has undoubtedly risen in significance enormously over our period of observation (e.g.Salgado et al., 2018).The institutionalization of CSR may manifest itself differently in different organizations, with some companies being frontrunners while others are laggards (e.g.Avetisyan & Ferrary, 2012).In our time frame from 2009 to 2021, this entails that some organizations -especially larger and more visible ones -may establish and advertise CSR positions earlier than smaller or less visible companies, and larger companies may also establish and advertise more specialized positions within CSR earlier than smaller companies, which may advertise CSR positions only in combination with other positions due to resource constraints, if they do so at all.However, precisely this heterogeneity among the companies and the advertised positions could be interesting for future research to explain the rationales behind the design of CSR jobs and their placement in the organizational structure.For example, the noteworthy portion of job ads that advertised jobs that included both communication and CSR tasks calls for a deeper exploration of the rationalizations behind such choices regarding organizational transformations.Further, the association between the design of CSR jobs and organizational characteristics, such as the level of institutionalization of CSR or the visibility of the organization, would be of interest, in order to obtain a better understanding of the development of CSR as an occupation.

CONCLUSION
Our discourse-analytic study of job ads for CSR jobs has provided insights into organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals in organizations.We identified four types of change, which we labelled organizational development, compliance, social approval, and agenda setting based on the accomplishments expected by companies that posted the job ads.These types of change provide a more nuanced understanding of CSR as an occupation, organizational visions behind CSR positions, and the complex and multifaceted role of CSR professionals as potential change agents for sustainability.The complex and diverse role expectancies of CSR professionals we identified have implications for the education of CSR professionals, which again defines their potential to transform organizations towards more sustainability.
ENDNOTES 1) We use these terms interchangeably in the context of occupations.
2) In retrospect, the first round of coding may seem superfluous.However, it helped us to get to know our data in sufficient depth for a more targeted coding revolving around change.
3) Examples from Danish job ads were translated into English • "… so that X over the next few years is active in setting the agenda for a number of areas that we prioritize" [transl.]• "set the agenda for public schools, healthcare, and elderly care of the future" [transl.] • "responsible for most of the public affairs work in and outside Denmark in the areas of payment systems, FinTech, IT security and digitization" [transl.]• "Develop and expand relationships with external partners, including NGOs, politicians, interest groups etc." • "draft policy papers and other documents as a basis for the societal agenda" [transl.] • "has responsibility for the representation of political interests" [transl.] • "set new standards for social responsibility in the gambling industry " [transl.]

Figure
Figure 2: Organizational role expectancies of CSR professionals