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Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation (CSRR): Do Companies Comply with Their Raised CSR Expectations?

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Abstract

This paper develops the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility reputation (CSRR) both theoretically and empirically. The first part examines the literature on CSRR extensively in an attempt to develop both a qualitative and a quantitative interpretation to measure CSRR. The new aspect of this paper is the explicit modelling of the confrontation of CSR expectations and CSR performance. Crisp and Fuzzy models were subsequently explored. A sample of 2,447 firms covering approximately 176 survey questions on corporate social responsibility, obtained from 29 countries, was then implemented to measure CSRR per company, per country and per sector. On average, companies were found to comply with their expectations. In conclusion – as based on our model – Europe was found to be the best CSRR ranked continent, and the United Kingdom and Finland the top ranked countries. We also found the ‘utilities’ sector to be the best ranked sector, with ‘health care’ and ‘financials’ at the lowest end of the distribution.

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Notes

  1. See Lockett et al. (2006) for an overview of the development of CSR literature in management journals.

  2. See the ‘Data’ section for an extensive description.

  3. See Fuente Sabate and Quevedo Puente (2003) for an extensive overview of the reputation literature.

  4. The capacity variable answers the question of whether raised expectations are met. The value variable measures what expectations (quantitative scores) are met.

  5. Our model allows for different market expectations per industry. However, in the application of our model we used one market average per year just for simplicity arguments. We admit that different sector averages result in more realistic rankings.

  6. DSR Bunnik is taken over by Sustainalytics Amsterdam, in January 2010.

  7. See www.siricompany.com for more information. The organizations stopped cooperating at the end of 2009.

  8. Out of 2,447 firms, 73 firms are non-stock-listed companies.

  9. On the basis of 6,356 observations of 2,447 firms during 5 years.

  10. See Table A1 and A2 in Appendix.

  11. The seven categories are called stakeholders by SiRi agencies. Therefore, the term ‘stakeholder’ is copied even though category A is not a ‘stakeholder’ of the firm per se.

  12. Not presented in Table A5.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Aloy Soppe

  2. Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Marc Schauten

  3. Deloitte Financial Advisory Services B.V. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jurjen Soppe

  4. Information Systems Group, School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Uzay Kaymak

Authors
  1. Aloy Soppe
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  2. Marc Schauten
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  3. Jurjen Soppe
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  4. Uzay Kaymak
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Appendix

Appendix

Tables A1, A2, A3, A4 and A5

Table A1 Number of Questions in the Questionnaire 2003–2004
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Table A2 Number of Questions in the Questionnaire 2005–2007
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Table A3 Applied Weights Alpha α in Equation (2.8)
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Table A4 Yearly CSSR Ranking of Top 10 and Bottom 10 Companies
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Table A5 t-tests CSRR Performance per Stakeholder
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Figures A1, A2, A3, A4

Figure A1
figure 2

 Five-year average CSRR rating distributed by countries in the period 2003–2007 Beta=10 for both the Crisp and the Fuzzy model.Note: Luxembourg, Taiwan, Korea, Poland, Brazil, Mexico and Russia have been omitted from this graph as they consist of fewer than five observations

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Figure A2
figure 3

 CSRR rating for continents: 2003–2007; 5 years.Note: Asia includes the following countries: China, Japan and Singapore. Europe includes Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. America includes Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the United States. Oceania includes Australia and New Zealand

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Figure A3
figure 4

 Five-year average CSRR ratings distributed by sector in the period from 2003 to 2007

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Figure A4
figure 5

 Distribution of CSRR scores under different model assumptions

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Soppe, A., Schauten, M., Soppe, J. et al. Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation (CSRR): Do Companies Comply with Their Raised CSR Expectations?. Corp Reputation Rev 14, 300–323 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/crr.2011.21

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