Research Objectives

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement is not new and has been gathering momentum for well over a decade. CSR is about how companies manage their business processes to produce an overall positive effect on society. This growth has raised questions how to define the concept and how to integrate it into the larger body of an organizations goals and objectives. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index created a commonly accepted definition of CSR: a business approach that creates long-term shareholder value by embracing opportunities and managing risks deriving from economic, environmental and social developments. Specifically, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index looks at competence in five areas:

• Strategy: Integrating long-term economic, environmental, and social aspects in their business strategies while maintaining global competitiveness and brand reputation.
• Financial: Meeting shareholders demands for sound financial returns, long-term economic growth, open communication, and transparent financial accounting.
• Customer and Product: Fostering loyalty by investing in customer relationship management, and product and service innovation that focuses on technologies and systems, which use financial, natural, and social resources in an efficient, effective, and economic manner over the long term.
• Governance and Stakeholder: Setting the highest standards of corporate governance and stakeholder engagement, including corporate codes of conduct and public reporting.
• Human: Managing human resources to maintain workforce capabilities and employee satisfaction through best-in-class organizational learning and knowledge management practices and remuneration and benefit programs.

The aim of research is to examine how CSR can contribute to building organizational-level social capital, which can serve as a useful resource to develop sustained competitive advantage for organizations. In addition, to help CSR managers attain strategic objectives of business, the concept paper attempts to develop a model that could provide managers with a mechanism by which they can integrate their CSR-related activities to gain strategic organizational outcomes.

A company’s success is the result of the level of satisfaction of the enterprise’s stakeholders, including, not only the company’s owner but also employees, customers, suppliers or the local community. Companies begin to understand that they need to operate in a complex network society to be successful, and also that social and environmental issues are part of that complexity and constitute factors of sustainable success. CSR is an approach whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis.

However, like in many other business concerns, also CSR needs support and stimulation from within as well as outside the company. This is especially true, if CSR is understood as a strategic means and management tool to enhance the competitiveness. So far, there have been some attempts to measure the scale of CSR, but still the available information is not sufficient for increasing awareness on the positive potential outcome of respective activities and making them become involved to a higher extent as presently.

In particular, the following aims are pursued to conduct research:

• Analysing the situation and development of CSR in different countries in terms of understanding and awareness of CSR by public authorities, the private business sector and the society
• Identifying and presenting the most important public, semi-public and private actors engaging in CSR as well as their policies, strategies and support measures targeted at fostering CSR.
• Gaining insight into the deployment of CSR in SMEs, including favouring and hindering factors and potential impact on competitiveness
• Identifying and presenting successful and Good Practice cases illustrating how and which CSR activities can contribute to SMEs’ competitiveness.
• Defining the relation between CSR performance in companies and the societal impacts generated outside companies
• Identifying various tools could be developed to advance the understanding of companies’ societal impacts through CSR and to discern CSR impacts from other impacts
• Analysing internal or external factors drive CSR performance and impact.
• Determining future societal impacts of CSR