Despite the increasing awareness that societal, sectorial, and organizational variables have a significant impact on manager and employee behavior, most studies in Asian and Middle Eastern (ME) countries, whether conducted by Western or indigenous scholars, continue to be informed by frameworks derived from the United States (US), Canada, or Western European countries (Leung, 2007; Li, 2012; Tsui, 2006) . This approach is problematic because the insights gleaned from such studies may fall only within Western theoretical constructs (Tsui, 2007; see also Shahin & Wright, 2004), thereby compromising insights regarding novel country-specific phenomena and the development of indigenous management/leadership knowledge. Consequently, many scholars (Rosenzweig, 1994; Rousseau & Fried, 2001) have called for the generation of indigenous management theories based on local conditions and socio-cultural factors, and for indigenous management and leadership research within non-Western countries (see Holtbrugge, 2013; Wolfgramm, Spiller & Voyageur, 2014; Shahin & Wright, 2004). This call is also pertinent for ME countries, where there is generally a paucity of indigenous management/leadership research and more specifically, of inductive emic (context-specific)

While directors’ knowledge represents a crucial resource for strategizing on boards, little is known how knowledge of individual directors becomes deployed behind the doors of the boardroom. Drawing on the concept of absorptive capacity, we develop a model that explores how directors’ explorative, transformative and exploitative learning affects boards’ strategic involvement. Using large-scale survey data, our findings indicate that learning helps to ex-plain how directors’ knowledge leads to higher levels of strategic involvement. Moreover, we find that learning processes mutually reinforce each other and have complementary effects on boards’ strategic involvement. Our study contributes to the board and absorptive capacity lit-eratures by demonstrating that learning processes are interconnected with each other and rep-resent an intermediate way to put directors’ knowledge into effective use.

This study generates comparative insights into CSR approaches of owners and non-kin professional executives in an emerging country context, Turkey. Drawing on 61 interviews, we found that ownership status of the executive is crucial in shaping their CSR perceptions and practices. Owner-executives are empowered in pursuing CSR approaches based on their personal preferences and values; they have mostly societal aims. Professionals display tendency for company-related CSR practice; they exhibit greater knowledge of CSR, and their CSR initiatives are the results of strategic choices to enhance their power within the corporation. Our paper contributes to the debate on the drivers for CSR by accounting for both societal and individual influences on the CSR agency of these two key groups of executives. First, we develop a typology of CSR approaches of owners and professionals. Second, we provide insights from an emerging country context. Third, we present empirically grounded practice implications for CSR.