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This study builds linkages between cross-cultural ethical issues and corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies from a context-focused approach, with special attention to high-tech MNCs that have outsourced or expanded their business activities from advanced societies to emerging economies. The study deepens the existing conceptualizations of the CSR construct and demonstrates how rankings of the CSR components are not necessarily fixed but rather vary due to different cultural values, national wealth, institutional conditions, organizational factors, and public sensitivity toward economic, social and environmental concerns. The study draws attention to the decline of corporate altruism in economic hard times and highlights some main obstacles, such as costs, difficulty to track CSR investment or practices to actual returns, segregation between the generic CSR concept and firm-industry specific competitive contexts, lack of support from top management, and lack of strategic guidance regarding where and how to focus on a large scope of CSR issues. Findings suggest that the extent firms are willing to compromise short-term profit maximization for the larger good of society is likely to vary across borders and among firms of different nationalities. Cultural values and institutional conditions emerge to shape the managerial CSR values and priorities, thereby jointly influencing their strategic CSR decision-making. Cultural values, national wealth, organizational factors and the firm-industry specific legal, regulatory context also influence a firm's predisposition toward relatively short-term vis-a-vis long-term returns to its shareholders and managerial inclinations about their personal moral obligations to larger society. Based on existing literature, empirical findings and firm-industry specific cases, this study offers a cross-cultural framework of CSR strategic options that firms can assess, compose, and implement in the context of international human resource management (IHR). Since many of the CSR issues have a direct link to the human side of business, this study demonstrates that strategic IHR has a key role to play in helping the firm identify, prioritize, and achieve CSR goals, thereby improving the firm-industry specific social and environmental conditions domestically and across borders. This study highlights a knowledge gap between the HR professionals from advanced societies and their counterparts in emerging economies regarding how CSR is integrally related to sustainability, benefits to the larger society, and competitive advantage of the firm, which opens the door for a special role of MNCs' IHR functions in formulation, communication, training, integrating, monitoring, enforcement, and continuous improvement of an organization's CSR vision, moral standards and strategic commitment. IHR will thereby become well positioned as a potential unifier to coordinate these CSR efforts internally and externally. Suggestions for future research are discussed and practical implications of the CSR construct and strategic options are provided.