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Corporate Responsibility (CR) firms engagement for social and environmental ends beyond the legally mandated minimum is probably the dominant rhetorical frame for the legitimation of contemporary capitalism. In my paper, I ask why CR has become salient at different times and has assumed different qualities across various European countries since 1980. Great Britain and Germany are my in-depth country cases, for it is claimed they represent extremes in the contemporary CR landscape. Britain, it is claimed, is European (if not global) CR leader, while Germany is a laggard among large European countries. My paper describes the institutionalization of CR in both countries in order to understand what factors contributed to these outcomes. Three stand out. First, urban dereliction and social unrest helped to bring CR up to speed in the UK in the 1980s; these pressures were largely absent in Germany. Second, the importance of state officials and policy entrepreneurs for promoting and subsidizing CR cannot be underestimated. Ironically, the British state has been very activist in this regard, while its German counterpart has remained largely inactive. Third, firms perceptions of their regulatory and welfare-state environment have a strong influence on the nature of their CR engagement, with perceived institutional constraints inversely related to engagement. Thus, CR gained momentum as Thatcher freed British businesses from their fetters, while this dynamic has only recently taken hold in Germany. Notwithstanding the insistence of mainstream CR literature that business objectives and societal responsibility imply and necessitate each other, sociological ambivalence a concept which focuses on the ways in which ambivalence comes to be built on to the structure of social statuses and roles is useful for highlighting some of the neglected contours of the CR landscape across Europe. Ambivalences are especially apparent where corporate responsibilities have tended to be institutionalized, legally binding, and constraining, as they have been in Germany. Corporate association officials there have at times pushed for the retrenchment of institutionalized forms of responsibility, such as corporate taxation, co-determination, and the welfare state, at the same time as they proclaim their far-reaching voluntary engagements as corporate citizens. As the substance if not always the form of institutions become ever more market-conforming and market-driven, these demands may become less audible. But firms may find that they have won a pyrrhic victory, as reconciling societal demands for responsibility with capitalism's imperative of profit maximization and its tendency to externalize costs is difficult without the hard backing of of˜beneficial constraints. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]