Abstract
While corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often viewed as a non-market strategy that facilitates foreign expansion, international business research has largely treated CSR as homogeneous, obscuring the variations in how different forms of responsibility travel across borders. Drawing on legitimacy theory and signalling logic, this study examines how disaggregated CSR dimensions influence firms' internationalisation and how corporate reputation conditions these relationship. Using a longitudinal panel of 414 publicly listed Indian firms for the period 2019-2024 and employing fixed effects panel data regression models, the sudy analyses the effects of climate, economic, human rights, community, and employment-related CSR initiatives on foreign sales intensity. The findings reveal pronounced heterogeneity. Climate and economic CSR are positively associated with internationalisation, indicating that globally legible responsibility practices generate legitimacy that travels across borders. Human rights CSR exgibits a weaker but positive association, reflecting hightened ethical scrutiny and credibility demands. In contrast, community and employment CSR are negatively related to internationalisation, suggesting that locally embedded responsibilities may constrain foreign expansion by reinforcing domestic institutional embeddedness and absorbing scarce resources. Further analyses show that corporate reputaion positively moderates the CSR-Internationalisation relationship, amplifying the legitimacy value of CSR signals under cross-border information asymmetry. Overall, the study demonstrates that CSR is not uniformly beneficial in international contexts and that its effectiveness depends on both the institutional portability of specific CSR dimensions and the credibility provided by reputational capital.