Organizing Corporate Social Responsibility in Small and Large Firms: Size Matters

Based on the findings of a qualitative empirical study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Swiss MNCs and SMEs, we suggest that smaller firms are not necessarily less advanced in organizing CSR than large firms. Results according to theoretically derived assessment frameworks illustrate the actual implementation status of CSR in organizational practices. We propose that small firms possess several organizational characteristics that are favorable for promoting the internal implementation of CSR-related practices in core business functions, but constrain external communication and reporting about CSR. In contrast, large firms possess several characteristics that are favorable for promoting external communication and reporting about CSR, but at the same time constrain internal implementation. We sketch a theoretical explanation of these differences in organizing CSR in MNCs and SMEs based on the relationship between firm size and relative organizational costs.     

National Security as a Corporate Social Responsibility: Critical Infrastructure Resilience

This article argues for an extension to the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research to include a contemporary issue of importance to national and global security, critical infrastructure resilience. Rather than extending the multiple perspectives on CSR, this study aimed to identify a method of recognising CSR-related issues, before applying it to two dissimilar case studies on critical infrastructure resilience. One case study was of an international telecommunications company based in the US while the other was of the railway network in Britain during a period of privatisation. The method used was derived from Okoye’s (J Bus Ethics 89(4):613–627, 2009) common reference core for CSR. Both case studies satisfied all the criteria sought which points to critical infrastructure resilience as being an emerging CSR issue. Because ongoing change characterises CSR, the method may have application for identifying future new CSR strands. As the findings suggest that some aspects of national and global security are CSR-related phenomena, the study demonstrates how CSR research may be significant at a societal, national and global level. Implications of the study include a broadening of the value and reach of contributions from CSR researchers and practitioners.     

Corporate Social Responsibility in China: A Corporate Governance Approach

Ethics training—an important means to foster ethical decision-making in organisations—is carried out formally as well as informally. There are mixed findings as regards the effectiveness of formal versus informal ethics training. This study is one of its first kinds in which we have investigated the effectiveness of ethics training as it is carried out in the Indian IT sector. We have collected the views of Indian IT industry professionals concerning ethics training (N = 266), and employed positivist (regression analysis and hierarchical linear modeling) and interpretive research (content analysis). We first have argued that the importance of the perception towards ethics has bearings not only on the individual ideologies but also on the organisational ethical values. In doing so, first we have conceptualised a theoretical framework: Perception of Ethics Training in Employees and Organisations (PETINEO). Second, we have studied the correlations between various components of this model. Third, we, under the rubric of PETINEO, examined the effectiveness of ethics training programmes for the Indian IT companies. Fourth, we have elaborated upon the results of our study. Our results suggest that the combination of both formal and informal means to undertake ethics training has superior impact on ethical decision-making in the Indian IT industry as compared to the use of any one of them in isolation.     

Corporate Social Responsibility

In the context of some criticism about social responsibility education in business schools, the paper reports findings from a survey of CSR education (teaching and research) in Europe. It analyses the extent of CSR education, the different ways in which it is defined and the levels at which it is taught. The paper provides an account of the efforts that are being made to mainstream CSR teaching and of the teaching methods deployed. It considers drivers of CSR courses, particularly the historical role of motivated individuals and the anticipation of future success being dependent on more institutional drivers. Finally it considers main developments in CSR research both by business school faculty and PhD students, tomorrows researchers and the resources devoted to CSR research. The conclusion includes questions that arise and further research directions.     

企业社会责任理论探析——基于法学视角

随着改革开放形势的发展,我国企业社会责任理论越来越受到关注.尽管相关理论及实践取得了一定成效,但仍存在诸多有待改进之处.首先,应进一步完善相关法律制度,政府鼓励企业担负其社会责任;其次,企业要加强自身治理,建立健全相应的体制机制;再次,强化社会——舆论监督.总之,应多方联动,促使企业更好地承担其社会责任.     

Measuring Corporate Social Responsibility: A Scale Development Study

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the most prominent concepts in the literature and, in short, indicates the positive impacts of businesses on their stakeholders. Despite the growing body of literature on this concept, the measurement of CSR is still problematic. Although the literature provides several methods for measuring corporate social activities, almost all of them have some limitations. The purpose of this study is to provide an original, valid, and reliable measure of CSR reflecting the responsibilities of a business to various stakeholders. Based on a proposed conceptual framework of CSR, a scale was developed through a systematic scale development process. In the study, exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the underlying factorial structure of the scale. Data was collected from 269 business professionals working in Turkey. The results of the analysis provided a four-dimensional structure of CSR, including CSR to social and nonsocial stakeholders, employees, customers, and government.     

Translating Corporate Social Responsibility into Action: A Social Learning Perspective

Journal of Business Ethics - Interest in the microfoundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown over the past decade. In this study, we draw on social learning theory to examine...     

Embedding Corporate Social Responsibility in Corporate Governance: A Stakeholder Systems Approach

Current research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) illustrates the growing sense of discord surrounding the ‘business of doing good’ (Dobers and Springett, Corp Soc Responsib Environ Manage 17(2):63–69, 2010). Central to these concerns is that CSR risks becoming an over-simplified and peripheral part of corporate strategy. Rather than transforming the dominant corporate discourse, it is argued that CSR and related concepts are limited to “emancipatory rhetoric…defined by narrow business interests and serve to curtail interests of external stakeholders.” (Banerjee, Crit Sociol 34(1):52, 2008). The paper addresses gaps in the literature and challenges current thinking on corporate governance and CSR by offering a new conceptual framework that responds to the concerns of researchers and practitioners. The limited focus of existing analyses is extended by a holistic approach to corporate governance and social responsibility that integrates company, shareholder and wider stakeholder concerns. A defensive stance is avoided by delineating key stages of the governance process and aligning profit centred and social responsibility concerns to produce a business-based rationale for minimising risk and mainstreaming CSR.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Social Investment: The South African Case

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social investment (CSI) have become terms that are used to examine some activities of businesses. With globalization pressures and increasing burdens on governments to provide comprehensive social services, the microscope has been trained on how firms play their part in sharing this burden. Views vary from those who believe that CSR and CSI are a distraction from profit maximization to those who argue that participation in such activities contributes to positive social transformation, while benefiting participating firms themselves. In this article, the author seeks to organize these debates within particular theoretical frameworks, positing CSR and CSI, together with the Socially Responsible Investment Index that has been used to evaluate corporate behavior in South Africa, as a novel way of addressing pressing development problems.     

公司治理与企业社会责任研究

<正>一、引言企业社会责任研究兴起于20世纪初,从20世纪50年代开始,西方学术界和企业界就对企业社会责任展开了热烈的讨论。目前对企业社会责任研究可分为两部分,第一部分是对企业社会责任概念的界定和完善     

Guest Editorial: Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility

The aims of this introduction are to define the field of Corporate Social Responsibility communication, to emphasize the role of communicating CSR and briefly to describe different perspectives on CSR communication. In the second part, I review the papers in this special issue and stress the importance of different perspectives in CSR communication.     

Wage-Hikes Test Corporate Social Responsibility

Extensive attention have been attracted by series of events in China, from the spate of suicides by employ-ees of Foxconn, to the strikes at the Guangdong prov-ince plantof Toyota, to pay increases now spreadingacross the country. These events, with key words being pay rise and improving working condition,     

Corporate Social Responsibility as Subsidiary Co-Responsibility: A Macroeconomic Perspective

Recent discussion on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mainly focuses on two aspects of CSR: from a technical perspective, CSR aims to improve ethical standards in the organizational decision-making process, and should guarantee that management practices are in accordance with commonly accepted standards of behavior. From a political perspective, CSR describes corporate engagement with ecological and social issues that extend beyond the firm’s economic activities. The latter perspective in particular leaves unclear whether such corporate contributions to solve environmental and societal problems should be seen as voluntary additional services or whether corporations bear specific duties in this field. Based on the tenet of subsidiarity derived from Catholic thought, this article emphasizes that the common interpretation of CSR should be extended by a third perspective that addresses corporations as intermediate actors bearing specific subsidiary co-responsibilities in society.     

Selective Engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility: A Stakeholder Perspective

This paper attempts to understand selective engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR involves various issues that can meet demands from multiple stakeholders. A firm can focus on certain CSR issues to satisfy a particular stakeholder while ignoring the demands from other stakeholders, or it can take a more balanced approach to CSR by addressing a wider range of social issues. In this paper, I investigate how stakeholder pressures from three types of primary stakeholders (customer, supplier, and employee) shape selective engagement in CSR. The empirical results based on a representative sample of more than 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the early 2000s suggest that firms prioritize their stakeholders based on instrumental considerations. Those stakeholders who have greater power over the focal firm will exert a larger impact on a firm’s CSR engagement. Constrained by limited managerial resources, firms accord attention to a limited range of issues most relevant to salient stakeholders. Specifically, MNCs as major customers pressure the focal firm to assume more responsibility for product quality, as well as on a wider range of social issues; SOEs as both major customers and major suppliers pressure the focal firm to assume more responsibility for employee welfare; employees with higher education pressure the focal firm to assume more responsibility for employee welfare, and for a wider range of social issues. This study contributes to stakeholder theory and research on the CSR of SMEs, and has important implications for CSR practitioners.     

履行社会责任不必讳言经济利益

曾经发掘过一个企业的责任竞争力案例,是企业的一项产品,能带来很好的社会效益和经济效益。谈到社会效益时,对方侃侃而谈,如何贡献民生,如何扶持产业,口若悬河、气宇轩昂。但是问到经济效益时,对方则开始扭捏：“你们干嘛老问这个？我们做这些不是为了经济效益”,言外之意,如果扯到经济效益,则显得做社会责任的动机不纯,利字当头,名不正言不顺。     

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Social Enterprise

In this article, we contend that due to their size and emphasis upon addressing external social concerns, the corporate relationship between social enterprises, social awareness and action is more complex than whether or not these organisations engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). This includes organisations that place less emphasis on CSR as well as other organisations that may be very proficient in CSR initiatives, but are less successful in recording practices. In this context, we identify a number of internal CSR markers that may be applied to measuring the extent to which internal CSR practices are being observed. These considerations may be contrasted with the evidence that community based CSR activities is often well developed in private sector small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) (Observatory of European SMEs, 2002), a situation which may be replicated in social enterprises especially those that have grown from micro-enterprises embedded in local communities. We place particular emphasis upon the implications for employee management. Underpinning our position is the Aristotelian-informed capabilities approach, a theory of human development and quality of life, developed by Sen (1992; 1999) and Nussbaum (1999) which has been developed further, in an organisational context, (e.g., Cornelius, 2002); Cornelius and Gagnon, 2004; Gagnon and Cornelius, 1999; Vogt, 2005. We contend that the capabilities approach offers additional insights into CSR in social enterprises in general and internal CSR activity in particular. Our article concludes with proposals for future research initiatives and reflections upon social enterprise development from a capabilities perspective.     

公共管理视角下企业社会责任缺失原因及对策

<正>企业的社会责任,是指企业在追求利润最大化的同时,对社会应承担的责任或义务,最终实现企业的可持续发展。具体来说企业的社会责任大致包括企业的个体责任、企业的市场责任和企业的公共责任。