Organizational Responsibility Development: What it is and Why it Happens

In this paper we focus on an important yet overlooked phenomenon: organizations have been strategically devolving some of their product-related responsibilities to customers, such as giving consumers a healthy food option rather than taking the responsibility of stopping producing unhealthy food. The consequences of such responsibility devolvement are multifold, including the shifted burden of practicing responsibility from organizations to customers, unnecessary social costs associated with customer self-regulation, as well as victims turned into offenders to blame. Drawing on institutional theory, we frame the actions of responsibility devolvement as a strategy of legitimacy loss prevention. We first define this phenomenon and then propose a few factors that help explain when organizations are more likely to devolve their responsibilities to customers.