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This paper aims to analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices from the epistemological position advocated by the MAUSS. The latter, beyond paying tribute to Marcel Mauss, refers to the project of combating all utilitarian and economistic reductionism.

This paper discusses the question of the definition of CSR practices by basing the analysis on the definition proposed by Etogo, which considers CSR practices as all forms of key-giving transactions, material or immaterial, which update the primary and secondary links between the company and its human and non-human environment.

The sociology of CSR practices is seeking the notion of gift in companies which are places of profit and utilitarian calculus. This research emphasizes that the triple duty of giving-receiving-returning structures CSR practices. The approach extends the perspective of Godbout’s gift, which recalls how Homo donator, along with Crozier and Friedberg’s Homo strategus, is at the center of CSR practices.

The proposed approach comes up against a particular limit. Despite its sociological fruitfulness, the gift paradigm is not immediately operational from a managerial point of view.

This reflection suggests to consider that CSR practices participate in a form of reconfiguration of the efficiency of the company insofar as they call into question the partial analysis of the efficiency of the company for the benefit of the shareholders. For CSR practices to be effective, managers must understand the interdependence between society and business: the well-being of society and business development cannot be opposed. Managers therefore need to integrate CSR practices into the company's strategy.

This reflection can have interesting implications in terms of building citizen identity. Specifically, it is a question of rebalancing the link between social and economic logics, by legitimizing the social utility of companies as well as their involvement in the organization and functioning of the city.

This note seeks to emphasize the fecundity of the epistemological position advocated by the MAUSS to reconstruct the role of CSR practices by adopting a balanced approach.

The purpose of this paper is to question gender identities as the basis for a differentialist conception of how to conceive and practice corporate social responsibility (CSR).

This study has used a qualitative approach to study five paths of small and medium-sized entreprises (SMEs) female entrepreneurs. This study selected female entrepreneurs who can bring us rich material, which highlights the relationship between the concepts of gender identity and CSR practices. In this perspective, this study has retained five “revealing” cases.

By establishing a break with the ontological experience that contributes to the application of CSR practices as a natural expression of behaviour, this study shows how social relations of sex reproduce but also how social relations are subverted with respect to the requirements relating to CSR practices.

The main originality of this approach consisted in adopting the concept of “gender inversion”, characteristic of “gender mobility”, to identify the potential and/or effective observable recompositions in the field of managerial behaviours.

This paper aims to analyze social sex relations by hypothesizing a reconfiguration, in a future time, of the “material and ideal foundations” of gendered entrepreneurship.

The approach consisted in adopting the gender approach in order to identify, on the one hand, the material and ideal elements that underlie the dominant entrepreneurial ethos; on the other hand, to question, starting from a “heuristic hypothesis”, the emergence, in a future time, of representations, behaviors and practices opposable to the dominant entrepreneurial ethos.

The research outcomes reveal that by investing in traditionally male bastions, women develop entrepreneurial dynamics detached from any gendered approach. This approach suggests how the representations, behaviors and practices related to the dominant entrepreneurial ethos can be modified.

At a great distance from some “naturalization of competences”, this paper deals with the modalities that contribute to overcoming the principles of gender differentiation. It proposes a theoretical framework to understand how the mobilization of the gender approach, characterized by the lack of differentiation of skills, invites, from a “heuristic hypothesis”, a questioning of the dominant entrepreneurial ethos.