Sensemaking and CSR Character in Multinational Corporations: A Comparative Study of Headquarters and Subsidiary Practices in the UAE

ABSTRACT While corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship assumes that organizational consistency signals effectiveness, there remains a knowledge gap about how MNCs navigate competing institutional logics between headquarters and subsidiaries. This study investigates how managerial sensemaking mediates the effects of institutional pressures on CSR character. Using a qualitative case study design with thematic analysis techniques, we conducted 21 semistructured interviews across 13 MNCs (headquarters in Western developed economies; subsidiaries in the UAE). CSR character emerges as an organizational construct shaped by cognitive frames, strategic narratives, and behavioral enactment. Headquarters construct CSR through compliance and performance logics; subsidiaries through stakeholder relationships and cultural embeddedness, representing strategic coherence under institutional duality, not dysfunction. This study extends institutional and sensemaking theory by demonstrating that organizational effectiveness under institutional duality emerges through strategic divergence, mediated by managerial sensemaking, rather than consistency. We recommend that practitioners design modular CSR governance that grants subsidiaries strategic discretion to operationalize core principles locally.