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The Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility

Matteo Tonello is Director of Corporate Governance for The Conference Board, Inc. This post is based on a Conference Board Director Note by Archie B. Carroll and Kareem M. Shabana , and relates to a paper by these authors, titled “The Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review of Concepts, Research and Practice,” published in the International Journal of Management Reviews .

In the last decade, in particular, empirical research has brought evidence of the measurable payoff of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives to companies as well as their stakeholders. Companies have a variety of reasons for being attentive to CSR. This report documents some of the potential bottomline benefits: reducing cost and risk, gaining competitive advantage, developing and maintaining legitimacy and reputational capital, and achieving win-win outcomes through synergistic value creation.

The term “corporate social responsibility” is still widely used even though related concepts, such as sustainability, corporate citizenship, business ethics, stakeholder management, corporate responsibility, and corporate social performance, are vying to replace it. In different ways, these expressions refer to the ensemble of policies, practices, investments, and concrete results deployed and achieved by a business corporation in the pursuit of its stakeholders’ interests.

This report discusses the business case for CSR—that is, what justifies the allocation of resources by the business community to advance a certain socially responsible cause. The business case is concerned with the following question: what tangible benefits do business organizations reap from engaging in CSR initiatives? This report reviews the most notable research on the topic and provides practical examples of CSR initiatives that are also good for the business and its bottom line.

The Search for a Business Case: A Shift in Perspective

Business management scholars have been searching for a business case for CSR since the origins of the concept in the 1960s. [1]

An impetus for the research questions for this report was philosophical. It had to do with the long-standing divide between those who, like the late economist Milton Friedman, believed that the corporation should pursue only its shareholders’ economic interests and those who conceive the business organization as a nexus of relations involving a variety of stakeholders (employees, suppliers, customers, and the community where the company operates) without which durable shareholder value creation is impossible. If it could be demonstrated that businesses actually benefited financially from a CSR program designed to cultivate such a range of stakeholder relations, the thinking of the latter school went, then Friedman’s arguments would somewhat be neutralized.

Another impetus to research on the business case of CSR was more pragmatic. Even though CSR came about because of concerns about businesses’ detrimental impacts on society, the theme of making money by improving society has also always been in the minds of early thinkers and practitioners: with the passage of time and the increase in resources being dedicated to CSR pursuits, it was only natural that questions would begin to be raised about whether CSR was making economic sense.

Obviously, corporate boards, CEOs, CFOs, and upper echelon business executives care. They are the guardians of companies’ financial well-being and, ultimately, must bear responsibility for the impact of CSR on the bottom line. At multiple levels, executives need to justify that CSR is consistent with the firm’s strategies and that it is financially sustainable. [a]

However, other groups care as well. Shareholders are acutely concerned with financial performance and sensitive to possible threats to management’s priorities. Social activists care because it is in their long-term best interests if companies can sustain the types of social initiatives that they are advocating. Governmental bodies care because they desire to see whether companies can deliver social and environmental benefits more cost effectively than they can through regulatory approaches. [b] Consumers care as well, as they want to pass on a better world to their children, and many want their purchasing to reflect their values.

[a] K. O’Sullivan, “Virtue rewarded: companies are suddenly discovering the profit potential of social responsibility.” CFO , October 2006, pp. 47–52.

[b] Simon Zadek. Doing Good and Doing Well: Making the Business Case for Corporate Citizenship . New York: The Conference Board Research Report, 2000, 1282-00-RR.

The socially responsible investment movement Establishing a positive relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) has been a long-standing pursuit of researchers. This endeavor has been described as a “30-year quest for an empirical relationship between a corporation’s social initiatives and its financial performance.” [2] One comprehensive review and assessment of studies exploring the CSP-CFP relationship concludes that there is a positive relationship between CSP and CFP. [3]

In response to this empirical evidence, in the last decade the investment community, in particular, has witnessed the growth of a cadre of socially responsible investment funds (SRI), whose dedicated investment strategy is focused on businesses with a solid track record of CSR-oriented initiatives. Today, the debate on the business case for CSR is clearly influenced by these new market trends: to raise capital, these players promote the belief of a strong correlation between social and financial performance. [4]

As the SRI movement becomes more influential, CSR theories are shifting away from an orientation on ethics (or altruistic rationale) and embracing a performance-driven orientation. In addition, analysis of the value generated by CSR has moved from the macro to the organizational level, where the effects of CSR on firm financial performance are directly experienced. [5]

The CSR of the 1960s and 1970s was motivated by social considerations, not economic ones. “While there was substantial peer pressure among corporations to become more philanthropic, no one claimed that such firms were likely to be more profitable than their less generous competitors.” In contrast, the essence of the new world of CSR is “doing good to do well.” [6]

CSR is evolving into a core business function, central to the firm’s overall strategy and vital to its success. [7] Specifically, CSR addresses the question: “can companies perform better financially by addressing both their core business operations as well as their responsibilities to the broader society?” [8]

One Business Case Just Won’t Do

There is no single CSR business case—no single rationalization for how CSR improves the bottom line. Over the years, researchers have developed many arguments. In general, these arguments can be grouped based on approach, topics addressed, and underlying assumptions about how value is created and defined. According to this categorization, CSR is a viable business choice as it is a tool to:

• implement cost and risk reductions;
• gain competitive advantage;
• develop corporate reputation and legitimacy; and
• seek win-win outcomes through synergistic value creation. [9]

Other widely accepted approaches substantiating the business case include focusing on the empirical research linking CSR with corporate social performance (CSP) and identifying values brought to different stakeholder groups that directly or indirectly benefit the company’s bottom lines.

Broad versus narrow views Some researchers have examined the integration of CSR considerations in the day-to-day business agenda of organizations. The “mainstreaming” of CSR follows from one of three rationales:

• the social values-led model, in which organizations adopt CSR initiatives regarding specific issues for non-economic reasons;
• the business-case model, in which CSR initiatives are primarily assessed in an economic manner and pursued only when there is a clear link to firm financial performance [10] ; and
• the syncretic stewardship model, which combines the social values-led and the business-case models.

The business case model and the syncretic models may be seen as two perspectives of the business case for CSR: one narrow and one broad. The business case model represents the narrow view: CSR is only recognized when there is a clear link to firm financial performance. The syncretic model is broad because it recognizes both direct and indirect relationships between CSR and firm financial performance. The advantage of the broad view is that it enables the firm to identify and exploit opportunities beyond the financial, opportunities that the narrow view would not be able to recognize or justify.

Another advantage of the broad view of the business case, which is illustrated by the syncretic model, is its recognition of the interdependence between business and society. [11]

The failure to recognize such interdependence in favor of pitting business against society leads to reducing the productivity of CSR initiatives. “The prevailing approaches to CSR are so fragmented and so disconnected from business and strategy as to obscure many of the greatest opportunities for companies to benefit society.” [12] The adoption of CSR practices, their integration with firm strategy, and their mainstreaming in the day-to-day business agenda should not be done in a generic manner. Rather, they should be pursued “in the way most appropriate to each firm’s strategy.” [13]

In support of the business case for CSR, the next sections of the report discuss examples of the effect of CSR on firm performance. The discussion is organized according to the framework referenced earlier, which identifies four categories of benefits that firms may attain from engaging in CSR activities. [14]

Reducing Costs and Risks

Cost and risk reduction justifications contend that engaging in certain CSR activities will reduce the firm’s inefficient capital expenditures and exposure to risks. “[T]he primary view is that the demands of stakeholders present potential threats to the viability of the organization, and that corporate economic interests are served by mitigating the threats through a threshold level of social or environmental performance.” [15]

Equal employment opportunity policies and practices CSR activities in the form of equal employment opportunity (EEO) policies and practices enhance long-term shareholder value by reducing costs and risks. The argument is that explicit EEO statements are necessary to illustrate an inclusive policy that reduces employee turnover through improving morale. [16] This argument is consistent with those who observe that “[l]ack of diversity may cause higher turnover and absenteeism from disgruntled employees.” [17]

Energy-saving and other environmentally sound production practices Cost and risk reduction may also be achieved through CSR activities directed at the natural environment. Empirical research shows that being environmentally proactive results in cost and risk reduction. Specifically, data shows hat “being proactive on environmental issues can lower the costs of complying with present and future environmental regulations … [and] … enhance firm efficiencies and drive down operating costs.” [18]

Community relations management Finally, CSR activities directed at managing community relations may also result in cost and risk reductions. [19] For example, building positive community relationships may contribute to the firm’s attaining tax advantages offered by city and county governments to further local investments. In addition, positive community relationships decrease the number of regulations imposed on the firm because the firm is perceived as a sanctioned member of society.

Cost and risk reduction arguments for CSR have been gaining wide acceptance among managers and executives. In a survey of business executives by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 73 percent of the respondents indicated that “cost savings” was one of the top three reasons companies are becoming more socially responsible. [20]

Gaining Competitive Advantage

As used in this section of the report, the term “competitive advantage” is best understood in the context of a differentiation strategy; in other words, the focus is on how firms may use CSR practices to set themselves apart from their competitors. The previous section, which focused on cost and risk reduction, illustrated how CSR practices may be thought of in terms of building a competitive advantage through a cost management strategy. “Competitive advantages” was cited as one of the top two justifications for CSR in a survey of business executives reported in a Fortune survey. [21] In this context, stakeholder demands are seen as opportunities rather than constraints. Firms strategically manage their resources to meet these demands and exploit the opportunities associated with them for the benefit of the firm. [22] This approach to CSR requires firms to integrate their social responsibility initiatives with their broader business strategies.

Reducing costs and risks • Equal employment opportunity policies and practices • Energy-saving and other environmentally sound production practices • Community relations management

Gaining competitive advantage • EEO policies • Customer relations program • Corporate philanthropy

Developing reputation and legitimacy • Corporate philanthropy • Corporate disclosure and transparency practices

Seeking win-win outcomes through synergistic value creation • Charitable giving to education • Stakeholder engagement

EEO policies Companies that build their competitive advantage through unique CSR strategies may have a superior advantage, as the uniqueness of their CSR strategies may serve as a basis for setting the firm apart from its competitors. [23] For example, an explicit statement of EEO policies would have additional benefits to the cost and risk reduction discussed earlier in this report. Such policies would provide the firm with a competitive advantage because “[c]ompanies without inclusive policies may be at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting and retaining employees from the widest talent pool.” [24]

Customer and investor relations programs CSR initiatives can contribute to strengthening a firm’s competitive advantage, its brand loyalty, and its consumer patronage. CSR initiatives also have a positive impact on attracting investment. Many institutional investors “avoid companies or industries that violate their organizational mission, values, or principles… [They also] seek companies with good records on employee relations, environmental stewardship, community involvement, and corporate governance.” [25]

Corporate philanthropy Companies may align their philanthropic activities with their capabilities and core competencies. “In so doing, they avoid distractions from the core business, enhance the efficiency of their charitable activities and assure unique value creation for the beneficiaries.” [26] For example, McKinsey & Co. offers free consulting services to nonprofit organizations in social, cultural, and educational fields. Beneficiaries include public art galleries, colleges, and charitable institutions. [27] Home Depot Inc. provided rebuilding knowhow to the communities victimized by Hurricane Katrina. Strategic philanthropy helps companies gain a competitive advantage and in turn boosts its bottom line. [28]

CSR initiatives enhance a firm’s competitive advantage to the extent that they influence the decisions of the firm’s stakeholders in its favor. Stakeholders may prefer a firm over its competitors specifically due to the firm’s engagement in such CSR initiatives.

Developing Reputation and Legitimacy

Companies may also justify their CSR initiatives on the basis of creating, defending, and sustaining their legitimacy and strong reputations. A business is perceived as legitimate when its activities are congruent with the goals and values of the society in which the business operates. In other words, a business is perceived as legitimate when it fulfills its social responsibilities. [29]

As firms demonstrate their ability to fit in with the communities and cultures in which they operate, they are able to build mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders. Firms “focus on value creation by leveraging gains in reputation and legitimacy made through aligning stakeholder interests.” [30] Strong reputation and legitimacy sanction the firm to operate in society. CSR activities enhance the ability of a firm to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of consumers, investors, and employees. Time and again, consumers, employees, and investors have shown a distinct preference for companies that take their social responsibilities seriously. A Center for Corporate Citizenship study found that 66 percent of executives thought their social responsibility strategies resulted in improving corporate reputation and saw this as a business benefit. [31]

Corporate philanthropy Corporate philanthropy may be a tool of legitimization. Firms that have negative social performance in the areas of environmental issues and product safety use charitable contributions as a means for building their legitimacy. [32]

Corporate disclosure and transparency practices Corporations have also enhanced their legitimacy and reputation through the disclosure of information regarding their performance on different social and environmental issues, sometimes referred to as sustainability reporting. Corporate social reporting refers to stand-alone reports that provide information regarding a company’s economic, environmental, and social performance. The practice of corporate social reporting has been encouraged by the launch of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in 1997-1998 and the introduction of the United Nations Global Compact in 1999. Through social reporting, firms can document that their operations are consistent with social norms and expectations, and, therefore, are perceived as legitimate.

Seeking Win-Win Outcomes through Synergistic Value Creation

Synergistic value creation arguments focus on exploiting opportunities that reconcile differing stakeholder demands. Firms do this by “connecting stakeholder interests, and creating pluralistic definitions of value for multiple stakeholders simultaneously.” [33] In other words, with a cause big enough, they can unite many potential interest groups.

Charitable giving to education When companies get the “where” and the “how” right, philanthropic activities and competitive advantage become mutually reinforcing and create a virtuous circle. Corporate philanthropy may be used to influence the competitive context of an organization, which allows the organization to improve its competitiveness and at the same time fulfill the needs of some of its stakeholders. For example, in the long run, charitable giving to education improves the quality of human resources available to the firm. Similarly, charitable contributions to community causes eventually result in the creation and preservation of a higher quality of life, which may sustain “sophisticated and demanding local customers.” [34]

The notion of creating win-win outcomes through CSR activities has been raised before. Management expert Peter Drucker argues that “the proper ‘social responsibility’ of business is to … turn a social problem into economic opportunity and economic benefit, into productive capacity, into human competence, into well-paid jobs, and into wealth.” [35] It has been argued that, “it will not be too long before we can begin to assert that the business of business is the creation of sustainable value— economic, social and ecological.” [36]

An example: the win-win perspective adopted by the life sciences firm Novo Group allowed it to pursue its business “[which] is deeply involved in genetic modification and yet maintains highly interactive and constructive relationships with stakeholders and publishes a highly rated environmental and social report each year.” [37]

Stakeholder engagement The win-win perspective on CSR practices aims to satisfy stakeholders’ demands while allowing the firm to pursue financial success. By engaging its stakeholders and satisfying their demands, the firm finds opportunities for profit with the consent and support of its stakeholder environment.

The business case for corporate social responsibility can be made. While it is valuable for a company to engage in CSR for altruistic and ethical justifications, the highly competitive business world in which we live requires that, in allocating resources to socially responsible initiatives, firms continue to consider their own business needs.

In the last decade, in particular, empirical research has brought evidence of the measurable payoff of CSR initiatives on firms as well as their stakeholders. Firms have a variety of reasons for being CSR-attentive. But beyond the many bottom-line benefits outlined here, businesses that adopt CSR practices also benefit our society at large.

[1] See Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: a Stakeholder Approach , 1984, which traces the roots of CSR to the 1960s and 1970s, when many multinationals were formed. (go back)

[2] J. D. Margolis and Walsh, J.P. “Misery loves companies: social initiatives by business.” Administrative Science Quarterly , 48, 2003, pp. 268–305. (go back)

[3] J. F. Mahon and Griffin, J .J. “Painting a portrait: a reply.” Business and Society , 38, 1999, 126–133. (go back)

[4] See, for an overview, Stephen Gates, Jon Lukomnik, and David Pitt- Watson, The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors Are Reshaping The Business Agenda , Harvard Business School Press, 2006. (go back)

[5] M.P. Lee, “A review of the theories of corporate social responsibility: its evolutionary path and the road ahead”. International Journal of Management Reviews , 10, 2008, 53–73. (go back)

[6] D.J. Vogel, “Is there a market for virtue? The business case for corporate social responsibility.” California Management Review , 47, 2005, pp. 19–45. (go back)

[7] Ibid. (go back)

[8] Elizabeth Kurucz; Colbert, Barry; and Wheeler, David “The Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility.” Chapter 4 in Crane, A.; McWilliams, A.; Matten, D.; Moon, J. and Siegel, D. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 83-112 (go back)

[9] Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler , 85-92. (go back)

[10] Berger,I.E., Cunningham, P. and Drumwright, M.E. “Mainstreaming corporate and social responsibility: developing markets for virtue,” California Management Review , 49, 2007, 132-157. (go back)

[11] Ibid. (go back)

[12] M.E. Porter and Kramer, M.R. “Strategy & society: the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.” Harvard Business Review , 84, 2006,pp. 78–92. (go back)

[13] Ibid. (go back)

[14] Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler, 85-92. (go back)

[15] Ibid., 88. (go back)

[16] T. Smith, “Institutional and social investors find common ground. Journal of Investing , 14, 2005, 57–65. (go back)

[17] S. L. Berman, Wicks, A.C., Kotha, S. and Jones, T.M. “Does stakeholder orientation matter? The relationship between stakeholder management models and firm financial performance.” Academy of Management Journal , 42, 1999, 490. (go back)

[18] Ibid. (go back)

[19] Ibid. (go back)

[20] Top 10 Reasons, PricewaterhouseCoopers 2002 Sustainability Survey Report, reported in “Corporate America’s Social Conscience,” Fortune , May 26, 2003, 58. (go back)

[21] Top 10 Reasons . (go back)

[22] Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler (go back)

[23] N. Smith, 2003, 67. (go back)

[24] T. Smith, 2005, 60. (go back)

[25] Ibid., 64. (go back)

[26] Heike Bruch and Walter, Frank (2005). “The Keys to Rethinking Corporate Philanthropy.” MIT Sloan Management Review , 47(1): 48-56 (go back)

[27] Ibid., 50. (go back)

[28] Bruce Seifert, Morris, Sara A.; and Bartkus, Barbara R. (2003). “Comparing Big Givers and Small Givers: Financial Correlates of Corporate Philanthropy.” Journal of Business Ethics , 45(3): 195-211. (go back)

[29] Archie B. Carroll and Ann K. Buchholtz, Business and Society: Ethics, Sustainability and Stakeholder Management , 8th Edition, Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2012, 305. (go back)

[30] Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler, 90. (go back)

[31] “Managing Corporate Citizenship as a Business Strategy,” Boston: Center for Corporate Citizenship, 2010. (go back)

[32] Jennifer C. Chen, Dennis M.; & Roberts, Robin. “Corporate Charitable Contributions: A Corporate Social Performance or Legitimacy Strategy?” Journal of Business Ethics , 2008, 131-144. (go back)

[33] Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler , 91. (go back)

[34] Porter and Kramer, 60-65. (go back)

[35] Peter F. Drucker, “The New Meaning of Corporate Social Responsibility.” California Management Review , 1984, 26: 53-63 (go back)

[36] C. Wheeler, B. Colbert, and R. E. Freeman. “Focusing on Value: Reconciling Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability and a Stakeholder Approach in a Network World.” Journal of General Management , (28)3, 2003, 1-28. (go back)

[37] Ibid. (go back)

Nice blog. CSR has become something very important to all the corporate houses today. However, with the rising growth of CSR activities. It is very important to have an effective software that helps to keep a track of the entire exercise.

Interesting article! Perhaps nice to give Mr. Stephen ‘Gates’ his real name back? After all “The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors Are Reshaping The Business Agenda” was written by Stephen DAVIS. I think he would like the recognition ;)

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Creating a Corporate Social Responsibility Program with Real Impact

• Emilio Marti,
• David Risi,
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• Andromachi Athanasopoulou

Lessons from multinational companies that adapted their CSR practices based on local feedback and knowledge.

Exploring the critical role of experimentation in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), research on four multinational companies reveals a stark difference in CSR effectiveness. Successful companies integrate an experimental approach, constantly adapting their CSR practices based on local feedback and knowledge. This strategy fosters genuine community engagement and responsive initiatives, as seen in a mining company’s impactful HIV/AIDS program. Conversely, companies that rely on standardized, inflexible CSR methods often fail to achieve their goals, demonstrated by a failed partnership due to local corruption in another mining company. The study recommends encouraging broad employee participation in CSR and fostering a culture that values CSR’s long-term business benefits. It also suggests that sustainable investors and ESG rating agencies should focus on assessing companies’ experimental approaches to CSR, going beyond current practices to examine the involvement of diverse employees in both developing and adapting CSR initiatives. Overall, embracing a dynamic, data-driven approach to CSR is essential for meaningful social and environmental impact.

By now, almost all large companies are engaged in corporate social responsibility (CSR): they have CSR policies, employ CSR staff, engage in activities that aim to have a positive impact on the environment and society, and write CSR reports. However, the evolution of CSR has brought forth new challenges. A stark contrast to two decades ago, when the primary concern was the sheer neglect of CSR, the current issue lies in the ineffective execution of these practices. Why do some companies implement CSR in ways that create a positive impact on the environment and society, while others fail to do so? Our research reveals that experimentation is critical for impactful CSR, which has implications for both companies that implement CSR and companies that externally monitor these CSR activities, such as sustainable investors and ESG rating agencies.

• EM Emilio Marti is an associate professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His research focuses on corporate sustainability with a specific focus on sustainable investing.
• DR David Risi is a professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and a habilitated lecturer at the University of St. Gallen. His research focuses on how companies organize CSR and sustainability.
• ES Eva Schlindwein is a professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on how organizations navigate tensions between business and society.
• AA Andromachi Athanasopoulou is an associate professor at Queen Mary University of London and an associate fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on how individuals manage their leadership careers and make ethically charged decisions.

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5 Examples of Corporate Social Responsibility That Were Successful

• 06 Jun 2019

Business is about more than just making a profit. Climate change, economic inequality, and other global challenges that impact communities worldwide have compelled companies to be purpose-driven and contribute to the greater good .

In a recent study by Deloitte , 93 percent of business leaders said they believe companies aren't just employers, but stewards of society. In addition, 95 percent reported they’re planning to take a stronger stance on large-scale issues in the coming years and devote significant resources to socially responsible initiatives. With more CEOs turning their focus to the long term, it’s important to consider what you can do in your career to make an impact .

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Corporate Social Responsibility?

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a business model in which for-profit companies seek ways to create social and environmental benefits while pursuing organizational goals, like revenue growth and maximizing shareholder value .

Today’s organizations are implementing extensive corporate social responsibility programs, with many companies dedicating C-level executive roles and entire departments to social and environmental initiatives. These executives are commonly referred to as a chief officer of corporate social responsibility or chief sustainability officer (CSO).

There are many types of corporate social responsibility and CSR might look different for each organization, but the end goal is always the same: Do well by doing good . Companies that embrace corporate social responsibility aim to maintain profitability while supporting a larger purpose.

Rather than simply focusing on generating profit, or the bottom line, socially responsible companies are concerned with the triple bottom line , which considers the impact that business decisions have on profit, people, and the planet.

It’s no coincidence that some of today’s most profitable organizations are also socially responsible. Here are five examples of successful corporate social responsibility you can use to drive social change at your organization.

5 Corporate Social Responsibility Examples

1. lego’s commitment to sustainability.

As one of the most reputable companies in the world, Lego aims to not only help children develop through creative play, but foster a healthy planet.

Lego is the first, and only, toy company to be named a World Wildlife Fund Climate Savers Partner , marking its pledge to reduce its carbon impact. And its commitment to sustainability extends beyond its partnerships.

By 2030, the toymaker plans to use environmentally friendly materials to produce all of its core products and packaging—and it’s already taken key steps to achieve that goal.

Over the course of 2013 and 2014, Lego shrunk its box sizes by 14 percent , saving approximately 7,000 tons of cardboard. Then, in 2018, the company introduced 150 botanical pieces made from sustainably sourced sugarcane —a break from the petroleum-based plastic typically used to produce the company’s signature building blocks. The company has also recently committed to removing all single-use plastic packaging from its materials by 2025, among other initiatives .

Along with these changes, the toymaker has committed to investing $164 million into its Sustainable Materials Center , where researchers are experimenting with bio-based materials that can be implemented into the production process.

Through all of these initiatives, Lego is well on its way to tackling pressing environmental challenges and furthering its mission to help build a more sustainable future.

Related : What Does "Sustainability" Mean in Business?

2. Salesforce’s 1-1-1 Philanthropic Model

Beyond being a leader in the technology space, cloud-based software giant Salesforce is a trailblazer in the realm of corporate philanthropy.

Since its outset, the company has championed its 1-1-1 philanthropic model , which involves giving one percent of product, one percent of equity, and one percent of employees’ time to communities and the nonprofit sector.

To date, Salesforce employees have logged more than 5 million volunteer hours . Not only that, but the company has awarded upwards of $406 million in grants and donated to more than 40,000 nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.

In addition, through its work with San Francisco Unified and Oakland Unified School Districts, Salesforce has helped reduce algebra repeat rates and contributed to a high percentage of students receiving A’s or B’s in computer science classes.

As the company’s revenue continues to grow, Salesforce stands as a prime example of the idea that profit-making and social impact initiatives don’t have to be at odds with one another.

3. Ben & Jerry’s Social Mission

At Ben & Jerry’s, positively impacting society is just as important as producing premium ice cream.

In 2012, the company became a certified B Corporation , a business that balances purpose and profit by meeting the highest standards of social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability.

As part of its overarching commitment to leading with progressive values, the ice cream maker established the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation in 1985, an organization dedicated to supporting grassroots movements that drive social change.

Each year, the foundation awards approximately $2.5 million in grants to organizations in Vermont and across the United States. Grant recipients have included the United Workers Association, a human rights group striving to end poverty, and the Clean Air Coalition, an environmental health and justice organization based in New York.

The foundation’s work earned it a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy Award in 2014, and it continues to sponsor efforts to find solutions to systemic problems at both local and national levels.

Related : How to Create Social Change: 4 Business Strategies

4. Levi Strauss’s Social Impact

In addition to being one of the most successful fashion brands in history, Levi’s is also one of the first to push for a more ethical and sustainable supply chain.

In 1991, the brand created its Terms of Engagement , which established its global code of conduct regarding its supply chain and set standards for workers’ rights, a safe work environment, and an environmentally-friendly production process.

To maintain its commitment in a changing world, Levi’s regularly updates its Terms of Engagement. In 2011, on the 20th anniversary of its code of conduct, Levi’s announced its Worker Well-being initiative to implement further programs focused on the health and well-being of supply chain workers.

Since 2011, the Worker Well-being initiative has been expanded to 12 countries and more than 100,000 workers have benefited from it. In 2016, the brand scaled up the initiative, vowing to expand the program to more than 300,000 workers and produce more than 80 percent of its product in Worker Well-being factories by 2025.

For its continued efforts to maintain the well-being of its people and the environment, Levi’s was named one of Engage for Good’s 2020 Golden Halo Award winners, which is the highest honor reserved for socially responsible companies.

5. Starbucks’s Commitment to Ethical Sourcing

Starbucks launched its first corporate social responsibility report in 2002 with the goal of becoming as well-known for its CSR initiatives as for its products. One of the ways the brand has fulfilled this goal is through ethical sourcing.

In 2015, Starbucks verified that 99 percent of its coffee supply chain is ethically sourced , and it seeks to boost that figure to 100 percent through continued efforts and partnerships with local coffee farmers and organizations.

The brand bases its approach on Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) Practices , one of the coffee industry’s first set of ethical sourcing standards created in collaboration with Conservation International . CAFE assesses coffee farms against specific economic, social, and environmental standards, ensuring Starbucks can source its product while maintaining a positive social impact.

For its work, Starbucks was named one of the world’s most ethical companies in 2021 by Ethisphere.

The Value of Being Socially Responsible

As these firms demonstrate , a deep and abiding commitment to corporate social responsibility can pay dividends. By learning from these initiatives and taking a values-driven approach to business, you can help your organization thrive and grow, even as it confronts global challenges.

Do you want to gain a deeper understanding of the broader social and political landscape in which your organization operates? Explore our three-week Sustainable Business Strategy course and other online courses regarding business in society to learn more about how business can be a catalyst for system-level change.

This post was updated on April 15, 2022. It was originally published on June 6, 2019.

About the Author

Corporate Social Responsibility

The teaching cases in this section explore corporate social responsibility from numerous perspectives, including corporations directly engaged in philanthropy, nonprofits hoping to build partnerships with corporate entities, and agencies/organizations aiming to change policies or norms. The cases inspire dialogue and debate on a broad range of topics including the inherent challenges of corporate philanthropy, the effect of economic policy on local workers, the politics of partnering with government, the role of globalization, and strategic concerns faced by nonprofit activists.

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Confronting the Unequal Toll of Highway Expansion: Oni Blair, LINK Houston, & the Texas I-45 Debate (B)

Embracing the Uphill Struggle: Marc Morial’s Quest for Corporate Diversity

Publication Date: October 25, 2021

As incoming President and CEO of the National Urban League in 2003, Marc Morial believed that promoting racial equity in corporate America was a natural part of the organization’s remit. In the latter third of the 20th century, the NUL had...

Alexandre Mars and Epic

Publication Date: June 11, 2019

The case examines the strategy, impact, and sustainability of a boutique philanthropy with a big goal: change the way people donate to charities. Epic Foundation was founded to support a portfolio of children’s charities. Now, its...

Danone North America: The World’s Largest B Corporation

Publication Date: April 26, 2019

This case study examines the B Corp certification process of Paris-based food products company Danone’s North American business. With $6 billion in sales, in 2018 Danone NA became the largest Certified B Corp in the world by a factor of...

Preventing Another Madoff: Reengineering the SEC’s Investigation Process

Publication Date: July 22, 2015

Bernard Madoff perpetrated a $60 billion fraud that lasted for more than a decade. The fallout ruined the lives of many of his investors and significantly damaged the reputation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). How did the...

Google.org: For-Profit Philanthropy

Publication Date: April 16, 2012

The Google.org: For-Profit Philanthropy case introduces a distinct social enterprise structure, a combination of a philanthropic division of a for-profit corporation and a nonprofit foundation. The case provides an up-to-date, in-depth...

Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator: A Model for Reducing Unemployment in South Africa

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 In the fourth quarter of 2021, South Africa's unemployment rate rose to 35%, the highest since 2008. Though some of the job losses could be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic, the country had already been experiencing high unemployment...

The Ethos Institute: Promises and Risks of Working with the Government (Sequel) (B)

Publication Date: May 05, 2009

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The Ethos Institute: Challenging Business to Become the Vanguard of Social Progress in Brazil (A) (Sequel)

The Ethos Institute: Challenging Business to Become the Vanguard of Social Progress in Brazil (A)

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Case Studies

Hyatt hotels: developing an integrated csr strategy, june 3, 2011, the challenge.

One of the biggest industries globally, travel and tourism contributes up to 10 percent of the world’s economy and about one in every 12 jobs. Yet most companies in this sector are still in the early stages of assessing and addressing their sustainability impacts. To better communicate the newly public company’s commitment to responsible practices, and to prepare for the increased transparency required of public companies, Hyatt leaders partnered with BSR to articulate a vision for an integrated sustainability strategy.

Our Strategy

Our goal was to help Hyatt build a strategy that connects corporate responsibility objectives to business goals in ways that:

• Deliver value and innovation to Hyatt’s operating companies.
• Identify and mitigate sustainability risks.
• Build trust externally and engage colleagues internally.

At Hyatt, which owns, manages, and franchises hotels, engaging internal stakeholders such as general managers, owners, associates, and executives was an essential first step in understanding the unique global and local sustainability challenges each property faces.

First, BSR interviewed several executives to establish senior management’s current and future conception of CSR. We then conducted workshops in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States to identify current activities, prioritize CSR issues, and understand regional nuances. Several key themes emerged:

• Addressing poverty and inequality in local communities through education and economic self-sufficiency
• Recruiting, developing, and retaining staff
• Managing the environmental footprints of its hotels, expanding its commitment to sustainable sourcing, protecting the biodiversity of the areas surrounding its hotels, and using sustainable design and construction

This work allowed Hyatt to develop and implement “Hyatt Thrive,” a strong, practical CSR vision representing Hyatt’s goal of creating “thriving communities, places where we are proud to work, our neighbors want to live, and our guests want to visit.” The platform, which establishes a global CSR framework with a common vision and strategic focus that can easily be implemented locally, is centered on four pillars: educational and personal advancement, health and wellness, environmental sustainability, and economic development and investment. Hyatt Thrive’s primary objective is to help the company communicate its philanthropic, environmental, and community engagement initiatives, and to position Hyatt to focus on and articulate the value it brings as a global company to the many communities it serves.

The CSR strategy has spurred additional sustainability initiatives, including a new human rights policy statement that references specific industry issues such as human trafficking. Hyatt Thrive also led to an improved approach to aligning Hyatt’s giving and volunteerism with the four pillars of the Thrive framework.

• Travel and Tourism

Let’s talk about how BSR can help you to transform your business and achieve your sustainability goals .

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Responsible Business in Space

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, corporate social responsibility: a case study in the company of urbanization of curitiba.

Social Responsibility Journal

ISSN : 1747-1117

Article publication date: 26 March 2021

Issue publication date: 7 January 2022

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the commitment to a corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice developed by Company of Urbanization of Curitiba S/A – URBS, located in Curitiba (Paraná), Brazil. The paper observes the CSR practice developed by the company.

Design/methodology/approach

A descriptive study that used a qualitative approach was held. The research strategy of the research used consisted of a case study. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews, documental analysis and direct observation. These data were further analyzed through the content analysis’ perspective.

The organization in question, even without obligation, develops a CSR project that contributes to the formation and awareness of young citizens, comprising ethical, voluntary, economical and legal responsibilities.

Research limitations/implications

Because of the fact that this is a single case study, the results cannot be generalized, representing only the reality of this case.

Practical implications

The practical implications of this study lies in the attention toward training of students of public schools, especially in aspects of buses and services usage and care for public equity, factors that even contribute to citizenship and the formation of better people and professionals. This will, in the future, contribute to form citizens that are more aware and who will tend to contribute to adequate usage of the transportation system as a whole, resulting in savings for the organization.

Social implications

The project analyzed in this study contributes to the formation of better citizens regarding the respect and ethical responsibilities they develop toward the public transportation system.

Originality/value

This paper demonstrates the commitment to a CSC practice made by a mixed-economy organization that develops this practice to contribute to the formation of citizens of the city. The value of this paper lies in the fact that it shows how CSR practices can be aligned with other practices of organizations, contributing to all stakeholders involved in it.

• Corporate social responsibility
• Social commitment
• Organizational strategy

Singh, A.S. , De Carli, E. , Virtuoso, L.A. , Segatto, A.P. and Alves, F.S. (2022), "Corporate social responsibility: a case study in the company of urbanization of Curitiba", Social Responsibility Journal , Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 85-105. https://doi.org/10.1108/SRJ-03-2018-0067

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Quantitative Research on Corporate Social Responsibility: A Quest for Relevance and Rigor in a Quickly Evolving, Turbulent World

• Original Paper
• Published: 25 November 2022
• Volume 187 , pages 1–15, ( 2023 )

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• Shuili Du 1 ,
• Assaad El Akremi 2 &
• Ming Jia 3  

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In this article, the co-editors of the corporate responsibility: quantitative issues section of the journal provide an overview of the quantitative CSR field and offer some new perspectives on where the field is going. They highlight key issues in developing impactful, theory-driven, and ethically grounded research and call for research that examines complex problems facing businesses and the society (e.g., big data and artificial intelligence, political polarization, and the role of CSR in generating social impact). By examining topics that are under-researched, forward-looking, and socially oriented, scholars can expand the boundary of CSR’s substantive domain and produce research that helps businesses act in a long-term, socially responsible way in this quickly evolving, turbulent environment. They also discuss ways to enhance the methodological rigor of quantitative CSR research and encourage scholars to employ cutting-edge, innovative methods to shed light on the micro-level mechanisms of CSR and reveal patterns and relationships hidden in unstructured big data.

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Introduction

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has flourished over the last few decades, providing significant insights into whether and how corporations should enact their societal obligations and stakeholder responsibilities. Sustainable and socially responsible development is a grand challenge for our society due to climate change, dwindling natural resources, and exacerbating social and economic inequity. Responding to this grand challenge, more than 12,000 businesses in 160 countries are signatories to the United Nations’ Global Compact, committing to aligning their business strategies and operations with socially responsible principles on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption. In 2019, the CEOs of the Business Roundtable, representing the largest US companies, released a new “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” that supersedes previously endorsed principles of shareholder primacy and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility (Business Roundtable, 2019 ). Without a doubt, CSR has entered the domain of mainstream business strategy, permeating key aspects of business decision making. At the same time, we live in a quickly evolving, turbulent world, facing unprecedented challenges, including disruptive technologies (e.g., big data, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology), political polarization, shifting geopolitics and international relations, and post-pandemic economic and social issues. These trends present new opportunities and challenges for corporations seeking to fulfill their social responsibility. Thus, the sizable body of CSR literature notwithstanding, we need more, not less, relevant and rigorous CSR research that examines complex and nuanced challenges and tradeoffs facing businesses today and that pushes the boundaries of the field by increasing the breadth and depth of CSR research topics.

Reflecting the prominence of CSR and the widespread scholarly enthusiasm with the topic, the CSR quantitative section of the Journal of Business Ethics receives several hundred submissions annually, of which only a small percentage are accepted for publication. The standards for publication are significantly higher than in the past for several reasons. First, as the field of CSR quantitative research matures, it becomes more difficult to provide novel and significant theoretical contributions. Previous studies on CSR have already examined many key outcomes (e.g., corporate financial performance, innovation, goodwill effect, stakeholder satisfaction and loyalty; Godfrey et al., 2009 ; Servaes & Tamayo, 2013 ; Valentine & Fleischman, 2008 ), antecedents (e.g., board and CEO characteristics, stakeholder pressure; Jia & Zhang, 2013 ; Perez-Batres et al., 2012 ), underlying psychological processes (e.g., identification, CSR attribution; Gond et al., 2017 ; Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001 ), and contingencies (e.g., corporate reputation, CSR fit, stakeholder characteristics; Sen et al., 2016 ). To generate significant theoretical contributions, CSR scholars need to either incrementally advance current CSR knowledge or offer an original, dramatically new perspective on CSR-related phenomena (e.g., strategic silence on CSR communication; Carlos & Lewis, 2017 ; Wang et al., 2021a , 2021b ), both of which become increasingly difficult as the body of CSR quantitative research expands. There are, however, plenty of opportunities for relevant and rigorous CSR research that tackles current and emerging social problems and issues, such as those related to big data and artificial intelligence and those related to political polarization. In line with the most recent JBE editorial that emphasizes “reconnecting to the social in business ethics” (Islam & Greenwood, 2021 ), CSR scholarship should be future-oriented and have some degree of foresight or prescience (Corley & Gioia, 2011 ) in trying to anticipate, conceptualize, and influence significant future problems related to firms’ social responsibility. It is important to conceptualize emerging topics and engage in research that shapes the future of the business world by questioning accepted practices and promulgating new ways of doing business responsibly.

The second reason that the standards for publications are higher is methodological. The journal and reviewers have set the bar high regarding methodological clarity and rigor. Papers with a strong method section should provide a clear rationale for sample selection and construct operationalization, explain and justify model specification and data analysis approaches, and sufficiently address key methodological concerns, such as construct validity, common method bias, endogeneity issues, and robustness tests. Innovative approaches in methods, such as utilizing multiple study designs (e.g., a laboratory experiment coupled with a field survey or an archival study) and employing cutting-edge technologies in data collection and analysis (e.g., eye tracking, neuroscience tools, textual analysis, and natural language processing), are highly appreciated.

Looking at the papers submitted to the CSR quantitative section, we find that rejected papers often exhibit one or more of the following characteristics: (1) weak theoretical contribution, sometimes due to a paper’s focus on a narrow and highly incremental topic or its lack of finer-grained conceptualization and insights (e.g., main effect hypotheses with little insight into the underlying mechanism and/or contingent factors); (2) questionable methods, sometimes due to weaknesses in the study design, sampling, measurement, or data analysis or a lack of empirical support for the hypotheses; and (3) poor writing, which manifests in various ways, ranging from substantive aspects such as unconvincing motivation for the study and incoherent or weak explanatory logic for the hypotheses, to technical aspects such as grammatical and punctuation errors, typos, and improper formatting. It is not uncommon for poor writing to hinder an otherwise promising paper.

In contrast, accepted papers tend to not only focus on an important topic and have a strong theory section but also demonstrate methodological rigor and offer rich insights with theoretical and practical value. To illustrate, while most previous CSR research examines business outcomes but neglects the social outcomes of corporate social initiatives, Boodoo et al. ( 2022 ) focus on the social outcomes of corporate philanthropy in the case of health grants by corporate foundations and find that, paradoxically, health grants are less likely to go to areas with more severe health needs, thus exacerbating health inequity. This research has important implications for the social efficacy of corporate philanthropy and calls for a data-driven and needs-based approach to the distribution of corporate donations and resources. Another example is the paper by Miller et al. ( 2022 ) examining the interplay between firms and individuals in the same geographic communities and finding that firms with high CSR performance positively influence the social distancing behaviors of individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research breaks new ground by expanding the scope of CSR outcomes and revealing a previously unexamined effect of CSR: how a firm’s CSR influences individuals’ ethical behavior in their communities.

As the section editors of the CSR quantitative section, we would like to share our view of where the field of CSR quantitative research is going, highlight several substantive topic areas that are timely but under-researched, as well as discuss ways to enhance the methodological rigor of research and call for the utilization of innovative methodological techniques. This editorial seeks to stimulate research on relevant, forward-looking topics and increase emphasis on methodological rigor and innovativeness.

Developing Impactful, Theory-Driven, and Ethically Grounded CSR Research

Research on CSR has been criticized for both a lack of theoretical foundations (Wang et al., 2020 ) and deficient practical impact (Barnett et al., 2020 ). Despite the tremendous growth of CSR research, we still question the value of the field and critique its insightfulness for managerial and organizational practices. The “countless” corporate investment in terms of time and money in CSR initiatives notwithstanding (Davidson et al., 2019 ), firms still struggle to determine how, where and when to devote their social and environmental efforts (Wang et al., 2020 ). Quantitative CSR researchers should move toward more novel theoretical development, stronger scientific rigor, and broader applied insight rather than filling gaps in the literature and refining analytic methods.

Impactful CSR Research

There are multiple ways to increase the potential impact of CSR research. First, we call for more research to quantitatively examine the societal and environmental outcomes of CSR. Until recently, CSR research was mainly dominated by a business-centric focus, primarily concerned with the business case of CSR and how CSR can improve firm-level outcomes such as financial performance, reputation, and competitive advantage. As a result, we know most about CSR’s impact on businesses and the various benefits for businesses, and least about how CSR affects the major societal issues it was intended to tackle (Blowfield, 2007 ). Calling for a shift in CSR research from a business-centric to a society-centric focus, Wickert ( 2021 , p. 15) urged, “We need to know more about how to effectively capture the impact of CSR beyond financial performance, as well as how different social and ecological outcomes are linked to what businesses do in the name of CSR.” Quantitative CSR research should investigate cause-effect relationships between CSR initiatives and societal outcomes such as workers’ health, equality and inclusion, biodiversity and natural environment resilience, and labor conditions and sustainable sourcing in global supply chains. It is also important to go beyond a short-term focus to examine the long-term, multifaceted, and sometimes double-edged impact of CSR on society and the environment (e.g., Luo et al., 2018 ; Wood, 2010 ). Such a socially oriented approach to quantitative CSR research will be more impactful and will broaden the predominant business case logic with social, ecological, and ethical cases (Wickert, 2021 ).

Second, producing impactful CSR research requires researchers to embrace new and bolder ideas instead of only focusing on theoretical “gaps” or methodological refinements. Impact should go beyond the narrower metric of research citations and measure whether a study pushes the boundary of existing CSR literature by tackling local and global societal problems in a quickly evolving, volatile, uncertain, and complex context. In addition to investigating “grand challenges” such as poverty, health, inequality, and climate change, researchers can produce novel insights into emergent phenomena that are significant and important to individuals, corporations, and the society, such as the changing role of CSR in an environment characterized by big data and smart technologies (Du & Xie, 2021 ) and political polarization and shifting geopolitical dynamics (Korschun et al., 2020 ), as well as the role of CSR in generating social impact and building societal resilience during major crises (e.g., the Covid pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War). Impact also comes from adopting multiple levels of analyses and innovative and rich methodological approaches such as field experiments and textual analysis using machine learning algorithms.

In summary, impactful CSR research investigates new, significant, and societally relevant topics and utilizes rich data analytic methods that better determine causation rather than just ascertain correlation. Theoretical and empirical rigor is not opposed to but rather contributes to the greater impact of quantitative CSR research.

Theory-Driven CSR Research

Theory-driven quantitative CSR research is important for several reasons. First, we need a theory-driven approach precisely because quantitative CSR research has often been criticized for being undertheorized (Wang et al., 2020 ). The field lacks both theoretical foundation and coherence despite the application of multiple theoretical perspectives, including stakeholder theory, agency theory, upper echelons theory, economic theories of information and incentives at the macro level and social exchange theory, identity theory, attribution theory, and justice theory at the micro-level. Many such theories, originated in other fields and based on the primacy of shareholder interests, either do not fit well within the CSR context or could not adequately account for the complexity of the intersection between economic, social, environmental, and governance interests that characterize the CSR field (Hilliard, 2019 ; Wang et al., 2020 ). Moreover, the field of CSR has been mainly practice-driven and empirically focused on the business case examining the relationship between CSR and corporate financial performance. This phenomena-driven focus, more prominent in earlier CSR research, has hindered the theoretical development of the field, limited its theoretical insights, and favored a loose application of theories and a lack of investigation of the underlying causal mechanisms and boundary conditions (Wang et al., 2020 ).

Second, a theory-driven approach to quantitative CSR research is necessary because using sophisticated empirical methods without theory-based causal analysis at best yields shallow and misleading results (Simmons et al., 2011 ). Theory provides guidance to research questions and logical reasoning, forces discipline in methodology (i.e., measurement, data collection, analysis), and imparts meaning to empirical results (Cortina, 2016 ; Van de Ven, 2007 ; Van Maanen et al., 2007 ). Third, when authors build their quantitative study upon a strong and relevant theoretical framework from the beginning, they can more clearly explain their theoretical contributions and show what is novel, significant, and insightful in their work beyond what we already know at a theoretical level. Starting with a solid theoretical framework is crucial for producing novel and impactful insights because “identifying the uniqueness and novelty of a given approach is difficult in the absence of a solid understanding of what is already known or assumed to be true in the literature” (Shaw, 2017 , p. 821).

Responsible and Ethically Grounded CSR Research

It is simplistic to say that all CSR research will contribute to making organizations more ethical and more socially responsible. Rather than describing and taking for granted what is socially responsible and ethical in corporate actions, CSR researchers should critically investigate and assess the ethical premises and the potential positive and negative social impact of these actions. We need to not only understand the role of ethics in business, but also use principles of ethics to evaluate and prescribe the role of business in society (Islam & Greenwood, 2021 , p. 1). For example, previous research has shown that CSR actions can cause unintended harm to some stakeholders who are vulnerable and beleaguered (Willness, 2019 ) and can lead to moral hazards where firms use CSR as reputation insurance to benefit themselves at the cost of society (Luo et al., 2018 ). Responsible research on CSR implies the importance of assessing the potential unintended negative effects of CSR practices and avoiding promoting organizational practices that are harmful to vulnerable stakeholders and society.

To promote responsible quantitative CSR research, scholars need to go beyond a narrow business case perspective when examining CSR phenomena and incorporate an evaluative element to orient ethical and socially responsible corporate actions. For example, when certain CSR actions may have negative effects on firm performance, rather than suggesting that firms should not practice these socially responsible actions, responsible CSR research should reveal the underlying mechanisms for why such negative impacts might occur, understand how to minimize the negative impacts, and examine the ways that firms could better approach these CSR actions to create positive social and business value (Hideg et al., 2020 ). To make quantitative CSR research more responsible, a crucial step is to deepen the study of CSR’s nonfinancial, social and environmental impact, such as the nuanced effects of CSR on community and stakeholder well-being, poverty reduction, diversity and inclusion, and climate change.

Furthermore, when studying the social impact of CSR, researchers should examine not only antecedents and outcomes, but also the underlying processes and boundary conditions of CSR actions. A deeper understanding of the causal mechanisms and contingencies will provide guidance for more effective CSR decision making and implementation and, in turn, accentuate the social impact of organizations’ CSR initiatives. Finally, responsible and ethically grounded CSR research should take into account conflicts of interest among various stakeholder groups to help organizations better understand the priorities and the nonintentional effects of CSR on various groups. To that end, research should shift from considering CSR as an aggregate and homogeneous construct to the analysis of specific subdimensions of sustainable development. The United Nation’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) Footnote 1 include an array of more concrete, diverse and comprehensive goals as compared to the often-used broad categorization of environmental, social, and governance performance. We encourage future quantitative CSR research to examine whether and how firms’ CSR could advance specific SDGs.

Substantive Topic Areas that are Under-Researched and Forward-Looking

Our society is rapidly transforming and faces unprecedented challenges, including disruptive technologies (e.g., big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology), political polarization, shifting geopolitics and international relations, and post-pandemic economic and social issues. By examining research topics that are under-researched, forward-looking, and socially oriented, quantitative CSR scholars can expand the boundary of the field’s substantive domain and produce impactful research that helps businesses act in a long-term, socially responsible way in this fast evolving, turbulent environment.

CSR in the Era of Datafication and Artificial Intelligence

Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are perhaps today’s most dominant trends, transforming businesses and individual lives and presenting abundant opportunities for CSR research in the era of datafication and AI. AI refers to the ability of machines to carry out tasks by displaying intelligent, human-like behaviors (e.g., machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing; Russell & Norvig, 2016 ). Over the last decade, AI technologies have experienced exponential growth and are being deployed on a rapidly increasing scale in many industries ranging from manufacturing, transportation, and communications, to retail, healthcare, and financial services. Powered by big data and continuously improving algorithms, AI systems can automate decision making, boost productivity and economy, and liberate individuals from tedious and repetitive work. The promised benefits of AI are numerous. For example, self-driving cars can dramatically reduce car accidents; AI-based healthcare could help solve the elderly care crisis in many developed countries; and smart and precision agriculture can reduce the usage of water, fertilizer, and pesticides while increasing yield.

At the same time, however, increasing datafication and the widespread deployment of AI have triggered many ethical and social issues and raised many urgent research questions for CSR scholars. Forward-looking scholars should broaden and deepen the conceptualization of CSR to better address the emerging ethical and societal challenges in the era of datafication and AI. For example, companies have an unprecedented responsibility to enhance the cybersecurity of their information systems and sensitive data and protect the data privacy of their stakeholders. Data breaches now occur more frequently than ever (Martin et al., 2017 ), exposing sensitive and confidential personal information of stakeholders and causing emotional stress, humiliation, and possibly financial loss. Researchers should examine the characteristics of effective cybersecurity practices that minimize the occurrence of data breaches. Relatedly, there is an urgent need to conceptualize and examine corporate responsibility in the digital space related to protecting stakeholder privacy and well-being. Individual consumers’ demographic information and behavioral data are being continuously tracked and analyzed, and the resultant insights are used in targeted advertising, content customization, and other ethically questionable business practices to achieve profit maximization (Zuboff, 2019 ). We call for research on socially responsible privacy practices that are centered around stakeholder well-being. One important research question is to examine the characteristics of corporate responsible data practices that are effective in protecting the privacy and security of stakeholders’ sensitive data. Researchers can also examine how a firm’s (ir) responsible data privacy practices influence its CSR reputation and stakeholder relationships.

Another area for future research relates to addressing the various limitations of AI and the associated ethical and social issues. Research suggests that most AI algorithms exhibit biases against minority and underprivileged groups, mirroring deep imbalances in the institutional environment and reinforcing social injustice (Zou & Schiebinger, 2018 ). Such AI biases will have profound negative social impact, especially considering that AI technologies are being deployed in many high-stakes domains, ranging from self-driving cars and mortgage lending to medical diagnosis and law enforcement. Future research can investigate the ethics of AI algorithms and the effects of AI applications on firms’ diversity, equity, and inclusion performance in the workplace and the marketplace. CSR scholars should compare and contrast various corporate approaches to dealing with AI biases and examine their efficacy in terms of the consequent social outcomes (e.g., inclusion and social equity metrics, well-being of vulnerable and disadvantaged stakeholders).

Finally, the increasing deployment of AI triggers other societal issues, such as potential large-scale unemployment due to automation and the widespread social media and smartphone addiction, all with far-reaching societal and political implications. These issues are fertile ground for relevant and impactful CSR research projects. For example, one promising area of research is to examine what are characteristics of effective corporate initiatives that reskill or upskill their employees to help them thrive in a digital, AI-mediated economy. It is also important to assess the social and business outcome of such employee-oriented CSR initiatives as well as contingent factors.

Overall, the ethical and societal challenges of datafication and AI are fertile ground for impactful CSR research. As companies navigate the uncharted territories of an increasingly AI-mediated economy, they could benefit from CSR research that sheds light on how companies can shape the future of ethical and socially responsible AI and achieve symbiosis between AI technologies and society. Relatedly, the emergence and availability of massive, unstructured big data and AI-enabled machine learning technologies (e.g., natural language processing, image processing, text, and sentiment analysis) also provide opportunities for quantitative researchers to explore new CSR topics and advance knowledge on existing topics.

CSR in a Politically Polarized Environment

We live in a world that is more politically polarized than ever, with a global political system that is undergoing profound transformation. In the United States, the disagreement has become nearly irreconcilable between Democrats and Republicans on the economy, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement, and a long list of other issues (Pew Research Center, 2020 ). In Europe, Brexit has polarized British politics, and the rise of right-wing populism has disrupted party systems in other European countries, such as France, Germany, and Austria (Noury & Roland, 2020 ). Political polarization has also manifested itself in the global south in countries such as Brazil, India, and Kenya (Carothers & O’Donohue, 2019 ). This widening ideological divide is caused in part by economic factors related to globalization and trade openness, rising inequality, and economic crises and anxiety; in part by a cultural backlash against the multiculturism and cultural evolution of the last 50 years (i.e., evolution toward gender equality, laws against the discrimination of ethnic and sexual minorities, etc., Inglehart & Norris, 2016 ); and in part by the prevalence of social media, the social media filter bubble, and fake news (Spohr 2017 ).

Against this backdrop of the widening political fissure, corporate political activism has become a frontier area of CSR (Moorman, 2020 ; Smith & Korschun, 2018 ), as is evident from the uptick in the number of companies taking a stand on politically controversial issues. For example, the US apparel company Patagonia created a space in its stores for customers to sign a petition against President Trump’s executive order discontinuing protections of large swaths of federal parklands (Stanley, 2020 ). Dick’s Sporting Goods took a highly publicized stance on gun control by removing guns from its stores after the 2018 Parkland, Florida school shooting (Bomey, 2018 ). Irish airline company Ryanair ran newspaper advertisements in 2016 against Brexit, arguing that consumers would end up paying more to fly outside of the United Kingdom (Davies, 2016 ). Indeed, business leaders increasingly consider it appropriate for companies to take a stand on political issues; according to a CMO survey (Moorman, 2020 ), 47.2% of marketing leaders consider it appropriate to make changes to products and services in response to political issues, and 33.3% consider it appropriate to have executives speak out on political issues. Comparing CSR and corporate activism, Eilert and Cherup ( 2020 ) note that while CSR generally focuses on issues that are widely favored or accepted in the institutional environment (e.g., supporting education, community outreach), corporate activism tends to focus on issues that are controversial in the institutional environment (e.g., gun control, transgender rights, racial equity) and thus has a moderate to high likelihood of triggering negative stakeholder reactions. These controversial sociopolitical issues are “salient unresolved social matters on which societal and institutional opinion is split, thus potentially engendering acrimonious debate among groups” (Nalick et al., 2016 , p. 386). Corporate activism pushes the boundary of traditional CSR in the sense that while both seek to “do good” for society, corporate activism addresses issues that face barriers in their progress toward a solution and promotes social change by “placing pressures on institutions” (Den Hond & De Bakker, 2007 , p. 901).

In this polarized environment, stakeholders are more likely to view companies through a political lens and expect companies to engage in partisan and controversial sociopolitical issues (Korschun et al., 2020 ). Recent research has begun to examine important questions about corporate sociopolitical activism, such as investor reactions to corporate activism (Bhagwat et al., 2020 ), various mental models of corporate activism (Moorman, 2020 ), and the efficacy of CEO activism (Chatterji & Toffel, 2019 ). As the frontier area of CSR research, there are many promising avenues for future research on corporate sociopolitical activism. Future research can investigate key antecedent conditions of corporate sociopolitical activism (e.g., issue-, company-, and stakeholder-specific characteristics) and examine how stakeholders react differently to corporate sociopolitical activism as compared to traditional CSR initiatives. Additionally, given the inherent business risks and controversial nature of sociopolitical activism, CSR scholars should identify strategic levers that companies can use to reduce business risks while enhancing the social and business outcomes of corporate activism and investigate the underlying mechanisms for corporate sociopolitical activism to create positive social change. It is also worth examining how firms could best communicate their corporate activism initiatives and how corporate activism affects consumer reactions (e.g., consumer attitudes, relationships with the brand, and purchase decisions) and employee reactions (e.g., job satisfaction, retention rate, etc.).

A New Mode of CSR Research: Strengthening Theoretical Perspectives on the Social Impact of CSR

Decades of CSR research notwithstanding, scholars have mostly focused on the business case of CSR (i.e., how CSR could affect a firm’s financial performance) but have largely neglected the social impact of CSR (Barnett et al., 2020 ). As a result, whereas there are extensive insights as to whether, how, and when CSR contributes to the financial bottom line of a company, there are extremely limited insights as to whether, how, and when CSR activities produce their intended social impact. Together with worsening climate change, widening social and economic inequalities, recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have accentuated and accelerated the need for CSR scholars to take a societal turn and focus on social issues and grand challenges such as poverty, social justice, human rights, healthy societies, and a sustainable environment. We call for a new mode of CSR research, urging quantitative CSR researchers to adopt a society-centric focus and examine the social and ecological impact of CSR. Understanding and quantifying the social impacts attributable to specific CSR initiatives is a necessary first step in better guiding firms’ resource allocation to CSR and the effective design of CSR programs. Along the same line, Barnett et al., ( 2020 , p. 955) advocate a design approach in CSR research, “Taking a design approach, CSR scholars transform from passive observers and assessors of organizations into active agents in designing and redesigning organizations to create a better world. Guiding managerial decision making toward the most efficient and effective means of achieving specific impacts—positive social changes—becomes the objective of CSR research.”

It is important to strengthen the theoretical underpinning when examining the social impact of CSR. We encourage researchers to adopt a diverse range of theoretical perspectives to deepen current understanding of whether, how, and when CSR could create social impact and benefit the targeted stakeholder groups. For example, resource-based view (Barney, 2001 ; Branco & Rodrigues, 2006 ) would be pertinent in linking a firm’s unique resources and capabilities to the social efficacy of its CSR initiatives; researchers can examine whether and how CSR initiatives that leverage a firm’s unique capabilities (e.g., technical expertise, marketing capabilities, human talents) are likely to produce greater social impact. Theories on social network and social capital (Burt, 1997 ; Inkpen & Tsang, 2005 ) can add conceptual depth when examining corporate alliances, cross-sector partnerships, and stakeholder collaborations aimed at addressing complex societal and environmental problems.

Theoretical perspectives are also essential when researchers attempt to capture, categorize, and quantify the different forms and various dimensions of CSR’s social impact. Barnett et al. ( 2020 ) use the literature on development economics to highlight the need to assess not only immediate outputs from CSR activities (e.g., number of beneficiaries served, emissions, and financial performance) and outcomes associated with CSR activities (i.e., correlational evidence on societal outcomes such as reduced emissions and improved work environment), but more importantly, causal impacts attributable to CSR activities (i.e., societal outcome improvement caused by CSR activities). Innovation is a key outcome of social impact due to its power in generating positive social change (Porter & Kramer, 2011 ), thus future research on social impact can draw upon theoretical perspectives on responsible innovation (Stilgoe et al., 2013 ) and sustainable innovation (Adams et al., 2016 ; Varadarajan, 2017 ) to predict, measure, and monitor the outcomes of social and sustainable innovation attributable to CSR activities. Finally, behavioral change is an essential aspect of social impact since for many social issues, ranging from health to diversity to environmental protection, it is often the behavioral change adopted by individual stakeholders that creates the most lasting impact in the effort to solve the issue. In this sense, theories from social psychology such as theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991 ) and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001 ) are applicable theoretical lens for examining processes and outcomes of desired behavioral change.

We call for more quantitative CSR research to rigorously examine the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the social impact of CSR activities and to draw more broadly and deeply from relevant disciplinary fields like development economics, sociology, social and cognitive psychology, social work, public health, and public policy. Deepening the theoretical perspectives for this new model of socially oriented CSR research would help us accumulate new insights and help firms design CSR initiatives for greater social impact.

Enhancing the Methodological Rigor of Quantitative CSR Research

Methodological rigor contributes to the credibility of research results and is critical to the overall quality of quantitative CSR research. CSR scholars should strengthen the rigor of methodology, including research design, construct measurement, data analyses, robustness testing, ruling out alternative explanations, and so on. Below we discuss two key issues in detail, construct measurement and the issue of endogeneity.

Construct Measurement

Since measurement is the lens through which we operationalize focal constructs (as well as all control variables), measurement accuracy should be paramount even in theory specification. Quantitative CSR research may suffer from low construct validity and a weak link between CSR constructs and their observed indicators. Many published articles in the quantitative CSR field do not provide sufficient evidence to draw strong conclusions about construct validity. Construct validity indicates the confidence that researchers have that the indicators used (i.e., measures) are good proxies of the targeted constructs (Aguinis & Vandenberg, 2014 ). In the absence of strong evidence of construct validity, substantive research results are generally inconclusive.

Poor construct measurement poses a serious threat to quantitative CSR research. Indeed, there are some critical and difficult issues that hinder the development, evaluation, and refinement of good measures of critical constructs in quantitative research methods. This includes the lack of precision of the underlying constructs, the use of single indicators and categorical measures to represent complex concepts, the inadequate assessment of reliability when self-reported scales are used, and insufficient attention to measurement levels and measurement invariance (Aguinis & Edwards, 2014 ; Cortina et al., 2017 ). To mitigate these measurement concerns, quantitative CSR researchers should more clearly define constructs, ensure that measures are conceptually related to their constructs, and carefully specify the nature and direction of relationships between concepts and measures (Aguinis & Edwards, 2014 ; Cortina et al., 2017 ). Finally, quantitative CSR research needs to establish more validity generalizations through meta-analyses and structural equation modeling (Cortina et al., 2017 ).

Causal Inferences and the Issue of Endogeneity

Causal claims are important and frequently made in quantitative CSR studies. However, to draw causal inferences, empirical studies must satisfy three conditions: (a) the cause must precede the effect temporally, (b) the cause and effect must be reliably associated, and (c) the relationship between the cause and effect must not be explained by other causes (Antonakis et al., 2010 ). The clearest way to establish causality is through randomized experiments. Unfortunately, random assignment is often impractical in CSR research, where studies are conducted in organizational settings or involve units of observation at higher levels of analysis than the individual, such as firms. Since CSR actions are not randomly assigned, nonexperimental studies are prevalent in quantitative CSR research. A major threat to the validity of these nonexperimental studies (e.g., those based on archival data or survey data) is endogeneity Researchers should address the issue of endogeneity with a combination of theoretical logic, research design, statistical analysis, and post hoc robustness tests.

Endogeneity can arise from various sources, such as omitted variables (i.e., unobserved heterogeneity), simultaneity (i.e., reverse causality or feedback loop), measurement error (i.e., systematic error or common method variance), or selection (i.e., self-selection or sample bias) (Wooldridge, 2010 ), which have various impacts and necessitate different remedies (Clougherty et al., 2016 ; Hill et al., 2021 ; Semadeni et al., 2014 ). Multiple methodological reviews show that statistical techniques used to deal with endogeneity, such as the instrumental variable method, are frequently misapplied or not adequately justified and explained (Wolfolds & Siegel, 2019 ). Moreover, even if multiple causes of endogeneity can affect the same estimated relationship in a single study, there is a need to clearly focus on specific causes of endogeneity, as there is no generic remedy for general endogeneity issues, but there is an extensive toolbox of methods adequate to deal with specific causes of endogeneity (Hill et al., 2021 ). Table 1 provides a summary of the different causes of endogeneity and the appropriate remedies.

Specifically, when endogeneity is caused by omitted variable bias, techniques such as control variables, fixed effects, sensitivity analysis, and instrumental variables may offer solutions to help remedy endogeneity (Wu et al., 2022 ). When the cause of endogeneity is simultaneity, dynamic panel techniques, instrumental variables, using exogenous events, or lagging the endogenous variable can be used to address endogeneity. For measurement error, the use of latent variable methods, instrumental estimation and CMV treatment are used to address endogeneity. Finally, Heckman method, differences in differences, and regression discontinuity are the more appropriate techniques when endogeneity is caused by selection biases. While it is impossible for any one study to fully mitigate all endogeneity concerns, we echo the recommendation by Hill et al. ( 2021 ) that, to sufficiently address endogeneity issues, researchers need to (i) offer a clear diagnosis of the endogeneity threat and explicitly establish whether and why a specific cause of endogeneity exists in a study, (ii) justify and clearly explain why the chosen technique is appropriate for addressing the specific source of endogeneity in the context of the focal study, and (iii) increase the transparency in the resulting prognosis and make precise claims about the conclusions regarding endogeneity treatment.

Employing Innovative Methods to Test Hypotheses

Different methods have their respective strengths and weaknesses. Field surveys and archival studies have higher external validity but tend to suffer from issues such as common method biases, inadequate construct measurement, and endogeneity. Randomized laboratory experiments ensure internal validity and shed light into causal links between constructs, yet they often have low external validity. Innovative methods have been employed to strengthen traditional laboratory experiments, field surveys, and/or archival studies. With the booming development of science and technology, we have seen increasing applications of innovative technologies in quantitative research methods, such as eye trackers, face readers, and cognitive neuroscience techniques. These high-tech approaches allow researchers to directly observe the cognitive, emotional and neural processes underlying individual reactions to CSR, shedding light on the micro-level mechanism of how individual stakeholders process CSR-related information and corroborating research findings based on self-reported measures. Below we discuss several state-of-art experimental study technologies that are suitable for CSR research.

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is a tool to measure eye movements (Holmqvist et al., 2011 ; Meissner & Oll, 2019 ). Eye-tracking studies generally focus on determining where people distribute their attention (such as fixation points or gaze points); to be more specific, eye tracking is used to locate pupil positions and to calculate fixation times and durations with the help of digital images (Ashby et al., 2016 ). One of the most common basic principles of eye tracking is the “eye-mind assumption,” which asserts that people’s attention at certain information is controlled by their brain. Therefore, through monitoring eye movements, eye tracking can reveal what is going on in the brain. For instance, assuming a researcher wants to understand how stakeholders read a CSR report and which parts of the report hold their attention, traditional research methods, such as self-reported behavior, can be inaccurate and misleading. Using eye-tracking data, we can directly assess readers’ fixation duration and times on target areas, thus helping us better understand how stakeholders read a CSR report and differentially process various parts of the report content.

The eye is the window of the soul, and approximately 80% of the external information received by people comes from the visual channel via the eyes; meanwhile, the processes of people’s psychological activities are reflected through their eyes. In an experimental setup, eye-tracking systems allow researchers to record the movements of a participant’s eyes during behavioral processes, thus providing “insights into the cognitive processes underlying a wide variety of human behaviors” (Ashby et al., 2016 , p. 96). Eye-tracking technology is an intuitive and effective method that could be employed in lab experimental settings to reveal the micro-level cognitive processes of stakeholders’ reaction to CSR activities.

Neuroscience Tools

Neuroscience tools enable researchers to have a deeper and more direct understanding of brain activities during decision making (Robertson et al., 2017 ). Common neuroscience tools include fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), EEG (electroencephalogram), and fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy). The basic principle of these neuroscience tools is that an individual's specific psychological activities will give rise to the activation and excitement of a certain brain area or neurons and thus changes in blood dynamics. Neuroscientific technology can help researchers observe the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of individual reactions. For instance, deontic justice theory holds that individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice; however, there is still no coherent framework for explaining how individuals produce and experience deontic justice. Cropanzano et al. ( 2017 ) advanced a theoretical model to provide further understanding into the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of deontic justice with the help of neuroscience tools. If researchers want to explore what stakeholders think when they make judgments about firms’ CSR activities, the neuroscience techniques could be very useful.

Apart from changes in attention and the brain, facial expression variations also provide researchers with useful information, as facial expressions generally reflect an individual’s emotions and affective states. FaceReader is an advanced tool to automatically analyze people’s facial expressions and provides researchers with an objective evaluation of subjects’ affective states (Noldus, 2014 ). In many cases, scholars need to test how subjects react after reading some critical information about firms. Instead of designing a survey to measure individuals’ emotions and feelings in an indirect way, it is more direct and more reliable to observe their facial expression changes with the help of FaceReader.

Machine Learning and Analysis of Unstructured Data

Eye tracker, FaceReader, and a variety of neuroscience tools could be employed in experimental studies to reveal the cognitive and affective mechanisms of stakeholder reactions to CSR, further enhancing the internal validity of experimental studies. On the other hand, tools such as machine learning and analysis of unstructured data are very useful and allow researchers to systematically extract the patterns and relationships hidden in massive amounts of unstructured data.

Unstructured data are commonly understood as “information that either does not have a predefined data model or is not organized in a predefined manner” (Wikipedia, 2022 ). An estimated 80% of data held by firms today are unstructured data, and they are growing 15 times faster than structured data (Balducci & Marinova, 2018 ). Unstructured data are multifaceted and include verbal (e.g., text, audio) and nonverbal (e.g., image, facial expression, geographic/spatial location) data. As compared to structured data, unstructured data allow researchers to have more flexibility for theoretical discovery and uncover richer conceptual and managerial insights (Balducci & Marinova, 2018 ; Li et al., 2019 ). Table 2 provides a summary of different types of unstructured data and some illustrative examples of prior literature analyzing these unstructured data.

Machine learning can undertake complex analysis with massive amounts of unstructured data. Machine learning techniques in the natural language processing field include topic modeling and word embedding models. Specifically, topic modeling assumes that documents are generated by certain topics, and one topic consists of a set of key words and phrases. Topic modeling extracts latent themes contained in a set of documents and represents the main content in the texts. Latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) is one of the most robust methods in topic modeling (Blei et al., 2003 ), which is an unsupervised machine learning technique that automatically extracts potential topics without human-labeled texts. Topic modeling infers the probability distribution of keywords across topics and the distribution of topics across documents by analyzing the patterns of word occurrence in a voluminous corpus. Based on the outputs of LDA analysis, researchers need to interpret and label certain themes based on the top keywords comprising the topic distribution. Topic modeling can be utilized to analyze key characteristics of CSR practices from corporate disclosures such as annual reports and sustainability reports. For corporate unethical behaviors, Brown et al. ( 2020 ) employed a Bayesian topic modeling algorithm to analyze public firms’ 10-K narratives and produce a valid set of semantically meaningful topics to detect financial misreporting.

In addition to topic modeling, the word embedding model is based on the logic that words illustrate similar meanings when they co-occur with the same neighboring words (Harris, 1954 ). The model can encode words or phrases as numeric vectors through a number of iterations based on a large textual corpus, which provides an effective way to measure the semantics. The new technology of “ word2vec ” is a breakthrough in natural language processing to quantify word vectors (Mikolov et al., 2013 ). Additionally, word vectors allow us to explore the relationship between two words via simple vector arithmetic, such as the cosine similarity, and find the synonyms of seed words. Employing the word embedding model, scholars have analyzed various unstructured data to describe corporate culture (Li et al., 2021 ), measure CEOs’ personality traits (Harrison et al., 2019 ), and identify customer needs (Timoshenko & Hauser, 2019 ).

There are other ways to employ textual analysis to distill the essential facts and trends in the textual information and to reveal the hidden and meaningful information contained in these texts. Prior studies on textual analysis utilize lexical analysis and syntactic structure, such as textual tone, readability, vagueness, and concreteness (Du & Kun, 2021 ; Fabrizio & Kim, 2019 ; Muslu et al., 2019 ). For example, Fabrizio and Kim ( 2019 ) find that firms are likely to use more obfuscating language to disclose their negative environmental information to blur the negative content and increase the information processing costs of the recipient (Fabrizio & Kim, 2019 ). Muslu et al. ( 2019 ) find that high-quality CSR disclosure, calculated based on tone, readability, length, and the numeric and horizon content of CSR report narrative, are associated with more accurate analyst forecasts. Sentiment analysis is another useful approach to detect individuals’ affect or opinions from unstructured data (e.g., online product reviews, social media posts). Sentiment analysis detects the polarity of texts, assessing whether individuals are expressing any form of positive or negative sentiment toward an object. Etter et al. ( 2018 ) employ sentiment analysis of social media data to evaluate affective responses of individuals toward an organization. Overall, unstructured data and cutting-edge machine learning techniques provide exciting opportunities for CSR researchers to examine new topics and extend literature in innovative ways.

We hope this editorial offers new perspectives on how to conduct impactful and rigorous quantitative CSR research. The field of quantitative CSR research has grown dramatically over the last several decades, accumulating a great deal of insights, yet at the same time, it becomes harder to publish papers in this field due to increasing expectations for theoretical contributions and methodological rigor. We hope this editorial can spur more quantitative CSR research that examines complex problems facing businesses today, that expands the substantive domain of the field by increasing the breadth and depth of research topics, and that employs rigorous and innovative methods to test hypotheses.

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Du, S., El Akremi, A. & Jia, M. Quantitative Research on Corporate Social Responsibility: A Quest for Relevance and Rigor in a Quickly Evolving, Turbulent World. J Bus Ethics 187 , 1–15 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05297-6

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Corporate social responsibility research: the importance of context

• Carol A. Tilt 1  

International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility volume  1 , Article number:  2 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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There has, in recent times, been an increasing interest in understanding corporate social (and environmental) responsibility (CSR) and, in particular, CSR reporting in developing countries. However, many of these studies fail to investigate fully the contextual factors that influence CSR and reporting in those countries, preferring to rely on theories and hypotheses developed from studies undertaken in the West, particularly the US, UK and Australasia.

It may be argued that this is appropriate as many emerging economies are experiencing growth and moving towards having a more market-based orientation. Notwithstanding this, a large number of these countries have an entirely different socio-political environment, with different political regimes, legal systems and cultural influences. These factors have a significant effect on the applicability of theories such as stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory and accountability theory, which are commonly used to explain the phenomenon of reporting.

In State Capitalist countries, such as China, an important influence on companies is the political ideology that underpins the nation’s government. The nature and impact of ideology and hegemony in China has been under-studied and, therefore, investigating how the ideology, and competing forces that may mitigate its influence, manifest themselves in Chinese reporting are essential. In the Middle East, countries such as Saudi Arabia have no free press, are ruled by a royal family, have a market dominated by the oil industry, and potential religious influences. Such socio-cultural differences mean societies develop different understandings of concepts such as sustainability and social responsibility. Finally, countries such as Sri Lanka have some similarities to other developing countries, but their economy is set against a background of a recent civil war – operating in a post-conflict economy is a factor rarely considered in social and environmental disclosure, yet has important influence on policy in these areas.

This paper discusses three contextual issues that warrant more and improved consideration in CSR research, with particular emphasis on CSR reporting research.

More and more corporations worldwide are involved in corporate social responsibility activities, and as a result are providing more social and environmental information to the public. Following from this, CSR disclosure, or reporting, has become one of the major fields of investigation by accounting scholars (Deegan 2009 ; Mathews 1997 ; Tilt 2001 ). Research that considers both CSR activity and CSR reporting has traditionally focused on companies in more developed economies, predominantly the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand (Burritt and Schaltegger 2010 ; Frost et al. 2005 ; Gray 2006 ; Gurvitsh and Sidorova 2012 ; Othman and Ameer 2009 ; Patten 2002 ; Sahay 2004 ), but recently there has been increasing interest in understanding the phenomenon in developing countries particularly as they experience growth and move towards a more capitalist orientation (Sumiani et al. 2007 ). Of the research that does exist, a number of papers suggest that ‘country’ is a determinant for CSR involvement and for the level of disclosure, but do not go much further.

Many of the studies of developing countries however, choose a framework for their investigation based on those shown to be meaningful for explaining disclosure in developed, capitalist economies. That is, they fail to investigate fully the contextual factors that influence firms and their reporting in those countries that have a different social, political, legal and/or cultural context.

It may be argued that this is appropriate as many emerging economies are experiencing growth and moving towards having a more market-based orientation. However, this is rarely acknowledged or questioned in these papers. Yet, it is reasonable to suggest that these factors have a significant effect on the applicability of theories such as stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory and accountability theory, which are commonly used to explain the phenomenon of reporting.

The majority of the world’s population lives in developing countries and each country experiences its own unique social, political and environmental issues (United Nations 2013 ). These countries are in the process of industrialisation and are often characterised by unstable governments, higher levels of unemployment, limited technological capacity, unequal distribution of income, unreliable water supplies and underutilised factors of production. As a result of rapid industrial development, policies are pursued that aim to attract greater foreign investment, and the investors are often keen to start benefitting from fiscal incentives and cheap labour. While these strategies make economic sense, they have adverse social and environmental effects, including the use of child labour, low or unpaid wages, unequal career opportunities, occupational health and safety concerns, and increased pollution.

In a review of the literature on determinants of CSR reporting (Morhardt 2010 ), reports that research on the impact of different variables in different regions is inconclusive due to the lack of enough studies. Factors that may influence CSR disclosure practices fall broadly into internal and external (Fifka 2013 ; Morhardt 2010 ), but are commonly classified further as (Adams 2002 : p224):

Corporate characteristics, such as size, industry group, financial/economic performance and share trading volume, price and risk;

General contextual factors, such as country of origin, time, specific events, media pressure, stakeholders and social, political, cultural and economic context; and

Internal contextual factors, including different aspects of corporate governance.

While CSR reporting has been studied by a large number of scholars, only a few fall into the second of the categories above, and consider context in detail. This is particularly relevant when considering developing countries. A few papers have specifically reviewed studies on developing countries. For example, (Belal and Momin 2009 ) categorise the work on developing countries into three groups: studies of the volume or extent of reporting; studies of the perceptions of CSR reporting by managers; and studies of the perception of CSR reporting by stakeholders. In all the studies reviewed there is little discussion of the context, other than a description of the country, and no real thought about the theoretical assumptions being made.

This paper presents a discussion of the different contextual issues or factors that show some evidence or potential to influence CSR and reporting in developing countries. It focusses on three specific issues and provides a research agenda for future consideration of the influence of context in CSR reporting research. The paper is structured as follows. The next section introduces some broad contextual factors that warrant consideration in the literature on CSR reporting. Next, three specific contextual issues are examined: the role of political ideology and hegemony; the influence of cultural understandings; and the impact of historical economic context. Finally, by way of conclusion, some recommended areas for further research are suggested.

Contextual considerations

Adams ( 2002 ) talks about the social, political, cultural and economic context, so some consideration of what this might mean is needed as each of these concepts themselves cover a variety of aspects, and indeed overlap. While papers may talk about the ‘social context’ in which the companies being examined operate, this is not well defined and little consideration is given to what this means. Some things that could be more explicitly considered include, inter alia : the role of the press; the status of women; the legal/justice system; the level of corruption; the level of government control, cultural understandings; and so on. This paper chooses to highlight three of these areas, and these are discussed briefly below in broad terms, followed by a discussion of some specific aspects of each identified as providing fertile grounds for future research.

Political system

Assumptions are often made about capitalist systems, whether explicit or implicit, as the vast majority of work on CSR reporting has been done in the Western context. However, there is little research looking at CSR reporting in socialist or communist countries. Some work has been undertaken on China (Dong et al. 2014 ; Gao 2011 ; Situ and Tilt 2012 ), but this work often applies the same conceptual frameworks as Western studies. What about the influence of ideology, and hegemony?

Sociocultural environment

Human beings have “distinctive cultural (learned) characteristics, histories and responses to their environment” and the term ‘sociocultural’ is commonly used in anthropological research to describe these and the “interactions and processes” that this involves (Garbarino 1983 : p1). Some general studies of culture and CSR using Hofstede exist (Silvia and Belen 2013 ), but an in-depth analysis of different understandings and conceptions of terms such as CSR as a result of sociocultural influences is lacking. The work that does examine specific factors often suggests that the Western concept of CSR does not fit these contexts (Wang and Juslin 2009 ).

The majority of work that considers sociocultural factors has looked mainly at religious aspects of CSR, most commonly by reviewing reporting by Islamic organisation, such as Islamic banks (Maali et al. 2006 ; Siwar and Hossain 2009 ; Sudarma et al. 2010 ). The teachings of many religions focus on social responsibility, the relationship with the natural environment, treatment of others, fairness, justice, etc., so there is a natural expectation that religion-based organisations may be more likely to engage in CSR and CSR reporting. A more nuanced consideration of how this manifests itself in different societies would improve understanding of the drivers and motivations of these activities. Similarly, other sociocultural factors, such as national identity, values, social organisation and language, could be incorporated.

Stage of development

The emerging literature on CSR reporting outside the Western world examines countries that are ‘developing’ (Belal and Momin 2009 ; Momin and Parker 2013 ), but little depth is included about where they are in their development journey and how the potential conflict between economic and social goals impacts CSR or CSR reporting. Rostow’s ( 1962 ) Stages of Economic Growth model suggests there are five stages (traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and age of high or mass consumption), yet most literature on CSR classifies countries only into developed or developing. The ‘developing’ classification potentially includes countries that are in Rostow’s first, second or third stage which may have an impact on their response to CSR issues. In addition to economic variables however, the United Nations also produces a Human Development Index (HDI) which considers life expectancy, education and income to measure how social, as well as economic, development (UNDP 2015 ). Both these concepts are important for consideration of CSR.

Importantly, consideration of just one or two aspects of these three broader contextual issues may result in misinterpretation of the results. Often these things interact, for example, social issues often cross over with cultural and religious impacts, or even with political influence where the regime is more hegemonic. It is thus important to consider, or at least acknowledge, the holistic nature of the context of the phenomenon being examined.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all of the issues raised here although this would be an important part of a larger research program. Therefore, three particular contextual issues, and three specific contexts, are the focus of this paper: the role of political ideology and hegemony (China); the influence of cultural understandings (Middle East); and the impact of historical economic context (Sri Lanka).

Politics, ideology and state control

Ideology is a set of common beliefs that are shared by a group of people, and is “the fundamental social beliefs that organize and control the social representations of groups and their members” (Van Dijk 2009 : p78). Countries such as China provide a fertile research setting to examine the influence of ideology, and hegemonic approaches of influencing CSR, which have been missing from most CSR research in the region.

The Chinese political model has some unique characteristics. Among these is the dominance of ‘the party state’, which exercises control in different forms over most aspects of the economy that is unmatched when compared to other state capitalist economies. Political leaders use a variety of tools (Bremmer 2010 ) and it is the combination of three particular tools that sets apart the Chinese system: the exercise of control as a dominant shareholder, the ability to appoint key positions in major firms, and the means to influence decision-making via ideology. First, the party exerts shareholder power over state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Chinese SOEs play an instrumental role in society (Du and Wang 2013 ) and make up around 80 % of the stock market (Economist T 2012 ). As protecting the environment is a major part of the guiding ideology and the nation’s policy, SOEs are likely to be keen to provide CER. Second, the party exercises power over the appointment of the senior leadership in SOEs (Landry 2008 ). This has resulted in control as they are “cadres first and company men second. They care more about pleasing their party bosses than about the global market” (Economist T 2012 : p6). Third, party control is exercised through ideology. The party has cells in most larger firms, whether private or state-owned, which influence business decisions made at board meetings. Given that China considers the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology as crucial this distinguishes it most significantly from other varieties of state capitalism that have a more liberal-democratic flavour.

There is some evidence that the first form of party control has been declining in recent times with the number of SOEs under the SASAC’s control halving over the last decade (Mattlin 2009 ). Similarly, since 1999, the share of SOEs in the economy has declined from 37 % to less than 5 %. This results in greater use of regulation and ideological hegemony to achieve its aims, yet most CSR research still uses state-ownership as a proxy for all types of state control.

Even after economic reform, ideology in China was still pervasive (Lieber 2013 ). Lieber ( 2013 ) argues that ideology is widely used to signal loyalty and the government is good at using ideology to “control and direct key vocabularies… (and) vague ideological language can create a climate of uncertainty thus increasing the range of a control regime” (Lieber 2013 : p346). However, the prevailing ideological themes in China are dynamic. In particular, most recently, new ideological themes have developed to respond to the changes in society. When economic reform began, “building up a socialist market economy with specific Chinese characteristics” was the guiding ideology (Zhang 2012 : p25). As such, economic growth was the country’s priority, but in 2005, “building up a harmonious society became the prevailing ideology” (and CSR is a key element of this resolution).

Ideology is used by the Chinese government to exert control over businesses. Traditionally, the government has “been considered a source of moral authority, official legitimacy and political stability…and …political language has been vested with an intrinsic instrumental value: its control represents the most suitable and effective way first to codify, and then widely convey, the orthodox state ideology” (Marinellin 2012 : p26). The language “developed and used by party officials … consists of ‘correct’ formulation, aims to teach the ‘enlarged masses’ how to speak and, how to think” (Marinellin 2012 : p26). The idea of the importance of a ‘Harmonious Society’ is the “re-contextualized discourse in response to the emergent issues in the changing social stratification order” (Zhang 2012 : p33). As a result, Chinese companies have been noticeably adopting the language of social concern and environmental protection.

It may therefore be suggested that CSR reporting in China is directly a response to the government’s ideological hegemony. However, the story is not as straightforward as it may first appear, for two reasons. First, despite a great deal of commitment to social and environmental regulation in China, implementation of these regulations has been limited. Second, as China enters a phase of continued economic development, Western influences may begin to have a moderating effect on the strength of the ideology.

The Chinese economy has grown rapidly in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) (World Bank 2016 ). The economic reforms that took place over the past decades were motivated substantially by the Chinese central government, and recent scholars have noted the positive role that ideology played in driving those reforms, notwithstanding that economists historically view ideology as “distorting… knowledge, judgment and decision making” (Lieber 2013 : p344).

With economic reform however, has come substantial environmental degradation which in turn has led to poor health outcomes for much of society generally. This led to a high level of commitment to environmental regulation in particular from as early as the 1990, followed by the release of even more rigorous regulations on environmental protection in the 2000s. However, despite the high commitment made by the Chinese central government, implementation of these policies is quite poor (Bina 2010 ). In terms of environmental regulation, for example, the implementation problems stem from a number of areas, including: the position of environmental protection agencies in the political framework; conflict between central and local governments; and supervision issues. The system of supervision of local environmental departments is a key problem (Bina 2010 ). When an environmental department is set up in the central government, corresponding environmental departments are set up in local governments. Ideally, these local departments should be agencies of the central department, deliver the central environmental department’s strategies, and supervise local environmental protection implementation. In reality, the local environmental departments are subservient to the local rather than central governments. All their financial support and staff appointments come from local governments. Therefore, rather than supervising local environmental protection implementation, the local environmental departments become “rubber stamps” for local governments (Zheng 2010 ). Therefore, it is unlikely that there will be efficient enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies at the local level (Bina 2010 ; Zheng 2010 ).

Finally, as China heads towards a market economy, government intervention becomes a policy choice, and markets function as a tool of national interest (Zhao 2011 ). However, as Chinese firms become more involved with foreign trading partners and markets, their reporting activity is also influenced by foreign and global organisations, leading to potential tension between demonstrating commitment to state ideological goals and meeting the requirements of global stakeholders.

Given the complexity of the context, research into CSR reporting in China needs to take into account the specific aspects of Chinese politics and culture in order to provide a nuanced understanding, and ultimately an improvement, of CSR reporting activities. However, a review done of the literature on CSR in by Chinese showed that it is very descriptive with little depth and much of the CSR literature is conceptual, descriptive, or argumentative in nature (Guan and Noronha 2013 ). The authors noted proper research methodologies are not systematically applied in some studies, and supporting theories are lacking. In the non-Chinese studies on China, there is also a predominance of papers on determinants and volume of reporting (Situ and Tilt 2012 ), with very few considering broader contextual factors, other than a few that look at specific cultural attributes (e.g., Rowe & Guthrie 2009 ).

Sociocultural understandings

Notwithstanding a move towards a market orientation of many developing countries, such as in China as outlined above, conceptions of CSR by management of companies in these countries may be quite different to those in the West (Wang and Juslin 2009 ). These differing conceptions may be a result of differing values and attitudes, language, religion or identity. Even specific elements of CSR are conceived of differently, for example in China, the main understanding of sustainability is in terms of environmental protection (Situ et al. 2013 , 2015 ). These socioculturally derived understandings are inevitably reflected in their reporting.

In another example, in the Middle East, the predominant perception of CSR is that it simply means philanthropic donations. In this region, the issue of social responsibility is relatively new, and as such the number of studies of CSR and CSR reporting in the Gulf region is growing (Al-Khatar and Naser 2003 ; AlNaimi et al. 2012 ; Emtairah et al. 2009 ; Mandurah et al. 2012 ; Marios and Tor 2007 ; Minnee et al. 2013 ; Nalband and Al-Amri 2013 ; Naser et al. 2006 ; Naser and Hassan 2013 ; Qasim et al. 2011 ; Sangeetha and Pria 2012 ). Many of these studies do not consider the cultural context to a very great extent as the research is emerging and focusses on perceptions. For example, Mandurah et al. ( 2012 ) and Emtairah et al. ( 2009 ) explored managerial perceptions of the concept of CSR in Saudi Arabia and found that managers are aware of the concept, but there is little connection between the managerial level perceptions and firms’ workforce. The authors describe CSR as being in its infancy phase, which limits the understanding of the concept to the view that CSR simply means being philanthropic. This indicates a different, and perhaps less developed, understanding of the concept in the region compared with the West, but the reasons for this, and the consequences for CSR reporting, are under-explored. Some authors suggest the narrow use of the term is because of the religious obligations towards society, (Visser 2008 ). There is only minimal evidence of any CSR practices other than philanthropy-based or any strategic approaches to CSR for long-term benefits (Visser 2008 ), but the trend is increasing and the forms that philanthropy takes is expanding.

It has also been argued that politics plays a significant role in increasing the awareness of CSR in the Arab world. Avina ( 2013 ) suggests that the perception of CSR in the Middle East changed after the Arab spring event, for both local and international firms. The term CSR more than a decade ago had little meaning to the public (Visser 2008 ) but since the Arab spring, the sense of social responsibility among civil society and the corporate sector has increased Avina 2013 ). Firms realised that they play a role in social responsibility, not just governments, and recognised that CSR should go beyond just donations to charitable causes (Avina 2013 ). Ronnegard ( 2013 ), however, predicts that CSR in the Middle East will not mimic the Western concept because of the strong influence of culture and religion in the region. Moreover, the influence of stakeholders in the Middle East is considered to be limited due to there being a lack of free press, few lobby groups and the different cultural attributes of employees and consumers. Some studies in Gulf countries have however, suggested that stakeholders, such as government and charitable organisations, may have an impact on firms’ behaviour (Emtairah et al. 2009 ; Naser et al. 2006 ). Others suggest that CSR may have developed as a concept due to the increase of foreign direct investment into Arab countries, the trend of shifting family and government owned firms into the public domain, and the globalisation of the region’s large national firms.

From the limited studies that have been undertaken, there is evidence of CSR reporting by Gulf country companies, with human resources and community involvement being the dominant themes in may reports Abu-Baker and Naser 2000 ). Thus, understanding of motivations for CSR reporting is not yet well developed and few existing studies consider the different level of stakeholder pressure in the region. This suggests that more research is needed on the formation of notions of CSR within specific contexts. This region is of particular interest because, according to the Human Development Report (HDI 2013 ), countries in the region are classified as high, or very high, in human development. That is, they are not only trying to develop and improve their economy, but are also trying to improve the quality of life of their citizens (Ramady 2010 ). The overall outlook of these countries indicates that they are performing well, however, Fadaak ( 2010 ) notes that identifying poverty lines is a challenge because of a lack of a clear definition of poverty in the region. There are no official reports considering poverty or other social problems and no GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries were found in the list of the World Bank Database in relation to the poverty rate.

Similarly, in other developing countries the importance of local economic, cultural, and religious factors that shape the business environment, and understandings of charity and philanthropy, need to be taken into account. Empirical work in this area is lacking (Lund-Thomsen et al. 2016 ). In Sri Lanka, for example, “the most common arguments used to ‘sell’ the business case for CSR and CP [Corporate Philanthropy], for example an improved brand image, increased market or customer share, employee retention, mitigated regulatory risks, and reduced tax burden, are considered mostly irrelevant” (Global Insights 2013 : p1). Business leaders engage in CSR for a range of business, humanitarian, social, religious, and political reasons. Key amongst them is a belief that ‘giving back’ to society discharges religious obligations to the poor, and an awareness that being seen to contribute to national development goals is important (Global Insights 2013 ). Hence, the conception of CSR in this region is culturally determined, but also shaped by the economic environment.

• Economic development

As well as government control, culture and political factors, the stage of economic development a country is in is also an important contextual factor that may impact CSR reporting. In China, as discussed above, the drive for economic reform led directly to environmental impacts which needed to be addressed. A number of other developing countries have been examined for their reporting on CSR issues, particularly from the Asian region (Andrew et al. 1989 ; Elijido-Ten et al. 2010 ), India (Mishra and Suar 2010 ; Raman 2006 ; Sahay 2004 ), and Bangladesh (Belal and Owen 2007 ; Belal and Roberts 2010 ; Khan 2010 ; Muttakin et al. 2015 ).

While these countries are classified as developing (IMF 2015 ), Bangladesh and India score only medium for human development. Another country in the region, Sri Lanka, has a high rating on the HDI, and has been exhibiting extensive growth since the end of a 30-year war (WPR 2015 ). Thus, exhibiting both economic and social growth aspects makes it an interesting case for studying CSR.

Sri Lanka has a population of over 20 million and foreign companies have increased their investments with one billion US dollars in direct foreign investments in 2013 alone ( BOI ). Classified as a middle income developing country, the challenge for Sri Lanka is to achieve high economic growth without causing irreversible damage to the environment and while continuing to eliminating social issues such as poverty, malnutrition and poor workplace ethics (Goger 2013 ). In addition, Sri Lanka also has a long history of corporate philanthropy, largely led by individuals whose values and actions stem from religious and cultural views (Beddewela and Herzig 2013 ) but has recently seen an increase in private firms offering development-related initiatives. Public infrastructure projects have been the main element of post-war economic planning, but there still remains rural poverty in the country. Thus, the primary motivation for CSR and philanthropy in Sri Lanka is poverty reduction, particularly for children and youth, social welfare organisations like orphanages and elderly homes, hospitals and health services, and veterans’ charities (Global Insights 2013 ). Thus, the economic, cultural, and political context means that these poverty rates have fallen (data indicates that the rate went from approximately 20 % in 2000 to under 9 % in 2013) and that inflation has slowed (Wijesinha 2014 ), so opportunities for private businesses to contribute to infrastructure abound. However, these private, development-orientated, CSR initiatives have often failed to deliver their aims and there is considered to be a danger that they may in fact perpetuate the causes of poverty and ethnic and religious conflict given their ties to particular ethnic groups (Global Insights 2013 ).

Notwithstanding this environment, the topic of CSR reporting in Sri Lanka has received relatively little research attention compared to other parts of the world (see Belal and Momin 2009 , for a review). In terms of motivations for CSR, there is some evidence that firms in which senior management have a positive outlook towards social and environmental practices tend to disclose more on these aspects, as compared to other firms (Fernando and Pandey 2012 ). However, reporting on CSR initiatives is not mandatory thus it is likely that any voluntary reporting by Sri Lankan firms will vary significantly. One study of reporting was conducted by Senaratne and Liyanagedara ( 2012 ) who examined the level of compliance with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines in the disclosures of publicly listed companies, selected from seven business sectors. The authors conclude that the level of compliance with the GRI is low and that disclosures vary significantly amongst the companies, potentially reflecting varying commitment to CSR. Similarly, a longitudinal study across five years (2005–2010) was carried out by Wijesinghe ( 2012 ) to identify trends in CSR reporting in Sri Lanka and the study identified an increasingly positive trend, predicting similar levels of disclosures provided by companies in developed countries. The few studies that have been conducted examining the predominance of reporting in Sri Lanka, mostly examining multinational companies, conclude that CSR reporting is gaining momentum in Sri Lanka but is still emerging as the concept of CSR itself emerges (Beddewela and Herzig 2012 ; Hunter and Van Wassenhove 2011 ).

Conclusion and a future research agenda

As more and more research on CSR in developing countries emerges in the academic literature, it is important to ensure that appropriate consideration is given to the context in which the research takes place. Examination of CSR and CSR reporting practices without contextualisation could perpetuate flawed understandings that are based on evidence from research in the developed world. Different political, social, cultural and economic environments impact on the both the development of, and reporting of, CSR activities and consequently impact on the value of these activities to benefit society and the natural environment.

A suggested agenda for future research, that considers context in more depth, includes:

Consideration of ideological and hegemonic regimes and their attitude towards CSR. This research would consider potential positive and negative impacts of the political and governance system. In China, for example, the potential for Communist Party ideology to increase environmental protection and improve social conditions is vast, and is starting to be seen to have a strong impact on firm behaviour. Examination of this over time will provide an important contribution to understanding the role of government beyond the more common analysis of environmental protection regulation.

Greater examination of sociocultural variables in different countries, beyond analysis of religious influence, and beyond the use of Hofstede. Understandings of concepts such as CSR in countries in Asia, the Middle East and the Asian sub-continent, are known to differ from those in the West, so understanding their potential to lead to better (worse) CSR outcomes is important. The variety of variables that could be included is vast, but some clearly important issues include: language, secularism, freedom of the press, access to information, homogeneity of values and attitudes, and the existence of a national figurehead or identity.

Longitudinal examination of the process of economic development. Countries where the economy is developing rapidly, such as China and the Middle East; and countries where the historical economic context differs dramatically, such as in Sri Lanka where the need for development is borne out of conflict, provide rich backgrounds to consider how CSR is developing alongside economic developments.

A comprehensive framework for examining these, and other, potential factors that influence CSR and CSR reporting in developing countries does not exist, but Table  1 attempts to provide a preliminary outline of some factors that could comprise such a framework, and be used to guide future research. As mentioned earlier, it is important to note, however, that these variables are not discreet and are likely to interact with each other. This is noted in the table as a reminder that the classifications are somewhat artificial and that acknowledgement of a more holistic consideration is important.

These are clearly only a selection of opportunities for CSR research on developing nations and emerging economies. Calls for more work on these factors have continued since Adams’ ( 2002 ) original call, but there is still vast scope to improve our understanding of CSR practice throughout the world (Fifka 2013 ), where much of the social and environmental damage is taking place.

Importantly, research of this kind must be transdisciplinary as perspectives from areas such as political science, philosophy and economics are essential. Only with in-depth, contextualised understandings can improvements to the nature of CSR activity be implemented.

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Acknowledgements

It is important to acknowledge that this paper provides an overview of a larger research program currently being undertaken by a team of doctoral students at Flinders University and the University of South Australia. Credit must be given to Ms Hui Situ (Flinders University) who is researching environmental reporting in China, Mr Abdullah Silawi (Flinders University) who is researching social responsibility reporting in the Gulf region, and Ms Dinithi Dissanayake (University of SA), who is researching environmental disclosure in Sri Lanka.

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Tilt, C.A. Corporate social responsibility research: the importance of context. Int J Corporate Soc Responsibility 1 , 2 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-016-0003-7

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