eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Objectives of the Study:

The focus of this study will be on social aspects of CSR. The objective of this research is to understand what driving forces there are to CSR performance. Those forces may be either external drivers such as legislation or market pressure, or internal drivers, such as use CSR of management instruments, integration of CSR in core business, or internal organizing of CSR.

Academic background and methodology:

This study is a multiple case study consisting of data from four retail sector companies and three textile sector companies. The empirical part of the study will be conducted using a qualitative approach. As a deductive study, several assumptions of external and internal CSR drivers that explain and affect CSR performance are developed based on existing literature. These are then reflected and tested against the data, in order to validate the assumptions. The primary assumption is that as CSR performance is very hard to measure, and difficult to compare between companies, there are several factors affecting the drivers and clear causalities is difficult to draw. Therefore measurement should be qualitative in nature and conceptualization should be based on literature and compared against in-depth case data. By outlining the findings of the case reports, it is possible to analyse the factors behind those findings, compare them with the qualities of the companies and scrutinize them in light of the literature, the external and internal factors, as the drivers of CSR.

Findings and conclusions:

The findings suggest that market pressure, use of CSR management instruments and, for textile sector, legislation are the main drivers of CSR performance. In addition, the combination of a separate CSR department and integrating CSR into business activities, for example, human resources, proved to be the winning combination on driving CSR. However, we can expect deviations on CSR performance to be a continuing trend as organizations can decide how, what, to what extent and how consistently they measure and record CSR issues.