The companies’ increased power also implies increased responsibility and new demands from the society and its inhabitants, and this responsibility of the corporations can be termed Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR. The core of the thesis concerns how a MNC can gain a competitive advantage through undertaking CSR in South East Asia. To operate in a prosperous way a company must gain recognition and acceptance, or in terms of the institutional network approach; legitimacy, from all its key stakeholders and the society in general, which is conducted through finding a harmony between the internal and external environments. The thesis consequently investigates the institutional settings of the internal and external environments of SKF Nilai in Malaysia, which functions as a case company, and the so-called matching strategies the company has used in order to harmonise the institutional settings. This paper further explores the implications and the actual benefits that evolve during the process of CSR, both at subsidiary and Group level.

In conclusion, certain requirements, both internally and externally, constitute the base on which the mother company and the subsidiaries rest. This foundation is necessary in order to develop the correct strategies for establishing and sustaining a competitive advantage through CSR, and includes supportive culture, competent management and supportive organisational structure.

In project management it is commonly accepted that the interests of stakeholders need to be dealt with to support the success of a project. By doing a meta-analysis of project management literature it is investigated how the stakeholder notion is used in this literature. Forty two publications are assessed against the purpose of this notion, the stakeholder definition and how the identification of stakeholders is addressed. The analysis shows that only a minority of the publications provides a clear definition and addresses the identification of stakeholders. We argue that a role perspective on the stakeholders issue fits the project context and therefore could fill this gap in the project management literature. After comparing the stakeholder approach with project role classifications from the literature, we conclude that a role-based stakeholder identification method is a promising approach for identifying stakeholders in projects.