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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming a dominant topic in Business Administration. Our basic assumption in this paper is to look at CSR as a new emerging institution, a new social practice at its first stage of experimentation and diffusion. The aim of the paper is to mobilize three economic approaches of institutions in order to study what they tell about the diffusion of CSR and its process of institutionalization: the modern evolutionary theory, the economic theory of conventions and the French school of Regulation. The first underlines the diffusion of CSR as an ecological process. The theory of conventions and the French school of Regulation emphasise the political facet of the CSR institutional dynamics. As a consequence we conclude in noting the divergence between these two approaches as far as the determinants of the CSR process of institutionalization are concerned.