From the long-term perspective, Europe as a whole has been described as the leader in reporting on socially responsible behaviour. European enterprises consider a compilation of CSR reports standard. Also, the quality of information provided is, compared to the surrounding regions, relatively high. However, several studies show that regional differences exist. In the Czech Republic, this type of reporting is still at the initial stage of development. Therefore, the first objective of the research is to find out whether Czech companies provide information about their social activities and what specific topics they prefer. The second objective is to determine what the quality of provided information is. To carry out this research, annual reports of 69 companies were assessed. The paper uses the method of conceptual content analysis. The results indicate that in their annual reports, companies tend to disclose issues beyond what is legally required. The most common reported topics concern the company's direction, information that promote the credibility of information provided and the confidence in the good corporate governance. However, the results also show that the quality of information provided is not too high.
Background and Purpose: Regular reporting on Corporate Social Responsibility (hereinafter referred to as CSR) should make it easier for enterprises to identify the sustainability risks and lead to an increased investors and consumers’ confidence. The aim of the paper is to find out how the indices which evaluate the socially responsible behaviour of enterprises are constructed.Design/Methodology/Approach: The scoping review is the method used in this study. The scoping question is: What do we know about the construction of indices evaluating the socially responsible behaviour of organisations from the existing expert resources?Results: The analysis of 20 papers shows that there is no consensus about the method of determining the weights and constructing the index. There are 4 approaches to the aggregated index construction. The first one uses the percentage of filling the specific criteria or the average of values of specific dimensions of the index. The second one uses the multi-criteria decision-making methods (most often the Analytical hierarchical process method). The third one uses unconventional linguistic models and fuzzy logic and finally, the fourth one uses the factor analysis or the method of the main components.Conclusion: The main feature of CSR indices lies in their methodological disunity. It complicates the understanding of the CSR outputs and essentially makes it impossible to create a CSR performance ranking, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (hereinafter referred to as SMEs).
Following the change in approach of the European Commission to corporate social responsibility (CSR), also the Czech Government had to commence a more intense creation of the national CSR strategy and of the regulative measures supporting socially responsible behavior. During the creation of both of these, the State utilized know-how of non-governmental organizations which had developed much more profound experience with the implementation of CSR in practice. For this reason, the target of this article has become the identification of the leading NGOs with the highest potential to influence further development of the national strategy together with specific form of state measures in this area. In order for the set goal to be achieved, the general scientific methods such as description, comparison and analysis were used. Further, also the SimilarWeb application was used. The performed analysis reveals that currently the youngest of all investigated NGOsthe Association of Social Responsibility-is currently closest to the leading position. It features the widest membership base and established interconnection with the UN Global Compact, the principles of which rank among the most respected frameworks of CSR regulations. Simultaneously, it strengthens its own position by means of a closer cooperation with the Quality Council of the Czech Republic.
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