In order to determine if firms implement Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) symbolically or substantively, the CSR management function’s access to resources has been used as a proxy for how entrenched CSR is within an organization. This multiple case study examines how seven firms take symbolic versus substantive responses over time and how this relates to the CSR function. The findings suggest that substantive CSR is associated with the CSR function’s decreased access to resources as CSR is incrementally taken over by business units. Their mounting involvement leads to the function’s disengagement and gradual reduction of its resource access. This insight concurs with institutional theory that provides an explanation of social processes that is not reduced to resources. All in all, this research adds a temporal understanding to the relationship of the CSR function’s amount of available resources and the different levels of CSR implementation.