Inhaltszusammenfassung

ntroduction and Background As a response to the growing social and environmental concern and awareness, more and more companies proactively publish their CSR-related principles and activities. As one of the most important sources of information on corporate activities, corporate annual reports include corporations' self-reported CSR performances and provide a means of determining the quality of the corporations' commitment to CSR (Macleod 2001). Past research that analyzed annual reports or C...ntroduction and Background As a response to the growing social and environmental concern and awareness, more and more companies proactively publish their CSR-related principles and activities. As one of the most important sources of information on corporate activities, corporate annual reports include corporations' self-reported CSR performances and provide a means of determining the quality of the corporations' commitment to CSR (Macleod 2001). Past research that analyzed annual reports or CSR reports in various national contexts (e.g., Abbott and Monsen 1979; Gray et al. 1995, Campbell 2004) has relied mainly on simple measures, such as word and page counts (Chen and Bouvain 2009), and mostly failed to provide a category scheme that goes beyond CSR-related activities. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to overcome some of this deficiency by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Data Analysis and Key Findings In order to identify recurring themes in the reports, we used content analysis. All reports were transferred to Rich Text Format, which is required by the analysis software Maxqda that we employed. The main categories found were Stated Philosophy toward CSR, CSR Motives, CSR-related Internal Activities, CSR-related Activities toward Suppliers, CSR-related Activities toward Society, Corporate Donations, Sponsoring and Charitables, CSR- related Cooperation, and Commendations. As to both CSR-related motives and activities, the longitudinal analysis of trends in CSR reporting reflects the growing importance of CSR in the stakeholder dialogue over time. To answer the question if and to what extent CSR activities are truly embedded in corporate strategy, we examined the relation between the three types of CSR-related motives (performance-driven, stakeholder-driven, value- driven) and CSR activities, using SmartPLS 2.0 (Ringle et al. 2005). The impact of performance-driven motives on CSR-related activities is positive and significant for all paths but the effect on supplier-directed activities and corporate giving. Regarding stakeholder-driven motives, our results reveal significant effects on all activities except for the relation to employee-directed activities and corporate giving. As to value-driven CSR motives, all paths show significant effects apart from activities directed at suppliers. Conclusions Our results support the idea that along with the publics' increased demand for businesses to operate responsibly, there has been a rise in significance of stakeholder-driven and value-driven motives as normative basis for engaging in CSR. Overall, in a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, this paper builds upon and extends past research efforts in the field of CSR and CSR reporting, as it provides deeper insights into qualitative, longitudinal, and quantifiable effects, encompassing a rich category scheme that also account for the stated CSR-related philosophy and motives to engage in CSR, related to different fields of CSR activities. References are available upon request. » weiterlesen» einklappen

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DFG Fachgebiet:
Wirtschaftswissenschaften

DDC Sachgruppe:
Wirtschaft