This PhD thesis is the outcome of three-year doctoral study of corporate social responsibility
(CSR) and stakeholder engagement in the water sector. This study contributes to new
knowledge about water companies formed as hybrid organisations in the aftermath of the new
public management (NPM) era worldwide. Today we see different hybrid organisations of water
companies around the world that have either been fully privatised or quasi-privatised. Quasiprivatisation
in Denmark means that water utilities are still perceived as natural monopolies,
which has not made them into for-profit driven companies. Instead a simulated market and state
regulation has been introduces with annual, national benchmarking to set a price cap as an upper
limit for the consumer-price of water. Similar systems are seen in fully privatised water companies
in the United Kingdom, the United States, and partially in South Africa. However, here the
water companies are typically owned by private companies and not established as municipalityowned
limited liabilities1 as in Denmark and elsewhere in Scandinavia. This PhD thesis proposes
new models and principles and corporate social responsibility and stakeholder engagement of
these water companies. The findings of the study suggest a new definition of a colonising logic
of CSR competing and coexisting with the regulators’ colonising logic of NPM. Through the
study and definition of these logics as colonising the water sector this PhD theisis provides an
understand of new perspectives of how CSR is enacted through stakeholder engagement and
how the logic of CSR frames the top managers’ claim: ”We are CSR!” (Interview B, March
2011) and the consequences of this logic. Both the logic of CSR and the logic of NPM is found
to be based on the materials that the water companies are organised around, namely water. Water
is perceived as a natural good that should ideally be free and plentiful for all citizens around
the world. However, the competition between the two colonising logics stems from another material,
namely the money or price that providing clean and pure water for all are allowed to cost
the citizens. Through the dialectical interaction of these in terms of material practices between
producing water and infrastructure to distribute it and collecting money as a payment for it and
the regulation of this, this PhD thesis proposes a new definition of the role of materials and material
practices underlying several institutional logics such as the institutional logic of capitalism,
state, democracy, family, religion/science, profession, and corporation (Friedland & Alford,
1991; Thornton et al., 2012; Friedland, 2013)