Social Perceptions Of Csr Line Up With Their Concurrent Expectations From The Company

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is something that affects all companies and should be an active factor in the company’s decision making. It is something all corporations need to care about. CSR is when business’ or corporations take part in an initiative or campaign for a cause that will benefit society and/or in some way make the world a better place (Taylor, 2015). Initially, Corporate Social Responsibility started to take shape around the 1950’s, but some say that it dates all the way back to the 1800s, the idea of CSR was seen (Carroll, 2007). One may think that because it is dated so long ago, it doesn’t have an important impact today nevertheless, it is proven that Corporate Social Responsibility is a pathway for entities to self benefit as they are in the process of benefitting society.

1. It is hard for companies to communicate their efforts in CSR to shareholders and investors. Although companies have progressed from only 20% of public companies publishing CSR reports to 72% from 2011 to 2013, there are still no universal standards established for reporting CSR information. Therefore, even the best CSR efforts can lose their value simply because the efforts are not communicated to users of financial statements. This is also in part due to CSR efforts being ill-defined. While some CSR ideas are universal many of the aspects of CSR are industry specific and hard to translate into meaningful disclosures for interested parties.

Current approaches to CSR are fragmented and/or disconnected from business goals. Many firms still consider CSR as another generic public relations problem in which media campaigns and CSR reports are used to paint the company as a positive ethical, social and or environmental advocator and supporter. For example, the annual reports discuss a firm’s sensitivities to CSR issues, but completely lack the entire story and offer no further forward commitments from the firm. Further, the ratings and rankings measurements are self-appointed by the firm, not always accurate to validate the work and direct impact to what they are measuring, and the criteria base varies widely and weighed differently in the final scoring. Worst of all the data lacks impartial auditors for validating the data to ensure the ratings have been accurately met, and data is statistically significant and a good proxy for what it is supposed to reflect. This has resulted in reactive initiatives designed to appease vocal

Pleas for corporate social responsibility will be truly embraced only by those executives who are smart enough to see that doing the right thing is a byproduct of their pursuit of profit. And that renders such pleas pointless” (Karnani, 2010). Meaning, the idea of CSR becomes a moot point, and brings us back to truth that companies will pursue markets where we demand products and services.

Although there is substantial variation in the environment and the corporate approaches that reflected in the literature, interest in the field that shows the poised to stimulates the further research and to provide both researchers and CSR practitioner some valuable direction for reflection and action.

However, if companies express their responsible activities heavily, consumers become sceptic and question the truth behind their behavior. Therefore, finding the right strategy to communicate a company's social activities is very difficult. Increasing competition requires firms to implement new innovative marketing strategies. Furthermore, there has been a shift from traditional to non-traditional marketing communication. Nowadays, social media, mass communication, buzz marketing and word of mouth are widely used. To be more precise, the communication pattern in marketing has changed from B2C to B2C2C also known as word of mouth (Moriarty, Mitchell and Wells 2014). Moreover, according to these authors, humans encounter more than 3,000 advertisements daily, which is the reason why more companies have difficulties to capture the attention of the

Unfortunately many corporations do not give back to the community in which they do business in. Also in different cultures, CSR is viewed differently both on a cognitive and emotional level. The data is taken from surveys and marketing research conducted with corporations and other organizations.

Forbes Magazine Entrepreneurs segment published an article “Why CSR? The Benefits Of Corporate Social Responsibility Will Move You To Act”. The author of the article Devin Thorpe, connected with several corporate executives representing small and large organizations from an array of different industries in efforts to establish if CSR does in fact benefit a corporation. Based off his discussions with these business professionals and experts, Devin concluded the following:

Lou and Bhattacharya (2009) maintain that CSR creates a level of ‘Moral Capital’, which then translates into ‘Relational wealth’ with different stakeholders. This is based on brand faith and credibility with costumers, affective commitment among employees and regulators, trust among suppliers and higher attractiveness for investors in general. Consequently it is important for organizations, to understand that CSR initiatives need to be communicated and transmitted to its group of interest. As Blomqvist and Posner (2004 cited in Comfort et al. 2007, pp.584) propose:

Therefore, corporate’ activities have strong influences to the stakeholders. Hildebrand,D,et,al (2011) argued that under a specific but identifiable situation, a company’s CSR actions are able to satisfy stakeholders’ higher-order and self-related demand, meanwhile enabling the stakeholders to identify with the company. On the other hand, Piercy, N. and Lane, N.(2009) indicated that CSR seems to be the most efficient way for the corporate marketing efforts of most firms. It may enable the stakeholders to be loyal even life-long customers of the companies.

There are numerous factors that are pushing businesses to adopt some sort of CSR model including, but not limited to the shrinking role of government, demands for greater disclosure, increased customer interest, competitive labor markets, and lastly, supplier relations (Corporate Social Responsibility, 2013). Despite the potential costs, frustrations, additional work and preplanning of a business adopting a CSR model, it is not without potential rewards that positively impact the company the environment, and our community. Some ways that an individual business may benefit are through increased workforce diversity, increased customer loyalty, and the ability to attract and retain

Some view CSR as a part of an organization’s overall “Issues management” initiative. Issues are situations that present matters of concern to organizations. Abe Bakhsheshy (2003) of the University of Utah defines it as a trend, an event, a development or a matter in dispute that may affect an organization. Issues management refers to the process by which an organization tries to anticipate emerging issues and respond to them before they get out of hand. As such, it is an ongoing process of aligning corporate behavior with stakeholder expectations. Issues arise when this alignment is missing. However, if these Corporate Social Responsibility issues are identified at an early stage, they can be prioritized, closely monitored and managed,

(3) Are Chinese consumers able to differentiate between the various responsibilities of businesses as laid out by Carrol (1979)? In particular, are the underlying factors/measures of CSR found in Western countries, i.e. economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities apply to Chinese consumers? (4) How and why does the relative importance among these factors in China differ from the Western context? The findings and implications of this study is important not only to Chinese businesses as they wrestle with CSR as a strategic component of business, but also to Western businesses as they plough large amounts of investments into China to take advantage of the burgeoning consumer market. The next section provides an overview of the literature on CSR and the consumer’s perspective in particular. In the third section, we explain the data and methodology used in this article. Next section provides the results of our analysis while fifth section discusses these results. We end the article by providing some implications for businesses and limitations of the study. Literature review CSR: definitional issues After several decades of research on CSR, McWilliams et al. (2006, p. 8) still concluded that ‘‘…there is a no strong consensus on a definition for CSR’’. The evolution of the definition becomes clear when one considers several definitions by past researchers. McGuire (1963, p. 144) for

However, stakeholders can be defined as including employees, shareholders, and consumers. CSR is a growing trend that is important to consumers, especially to the millennial generation. It is actually investing in the future of the company to conduct CSR and to formulate long-term, profitable relationships of trust with millennials, who are the consumers of the future. Proper CSR can also attract future talent to support and work with the organization. A 2002 study conducted by Net Impact found that more than half of the 2,100 MBA students surveyed indicated they would accept a lower salary in order to work for a socially responsible company. (Kotler & Lee, 2005). CSR can be a means of not only building a positive brand image and respected corporate philosophy, but also attracting young working talent and developing the company’s market share with the upcoming millennial

Corporations that do not equip themselves with CSR activities will often be left behind with the increasing global competition and borderless markets, and international corporations with sound CSR activities grow stronger (Altman, 2007). As the education level increases, consumers are made more aware of the need for pro social corporate behaviour.