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Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. (in press) Published online in Wiley InterScience () DOI: 10.1002/csr.132 How Corporate Social Responsibility is Defined: an Analysis of 37 Definitions Alexander Dahlsrud* Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Faculty of Social Science and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway ABSTRACT Despite numerous efforts to bring about a clear and unbiased definition of CSR, there is still some confusion as to how CSR should be defined. In this paper five dimen- sions of CSR are developed through a content analysis of existing CSR definitions. Frequency counts are used to analyse how often these dimensions are invoked. The analysis shows that the existing definitions are to a large degree congruent. Thus it is concluded that the confusion is not so much about how CSR is defined, as about how CSR is socially constructed in a specific context. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 24 April 2006; revised 31 August 2006; accepted 18 September 2006 Keywords: analysis; corporate social responsibility; definitions; discourse; social construction Introduction HE CORPORATE WORLD IS FACING THE NOTION OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR) wherever it turns these days. On a wide range of issues corporations are encouraged to behave socially responsibly (Welford and Frost, 2006; Engle, 2006). However, in both the corporate and Tthe academic world there is uncertainty as to how