An exploratory analysis of corporate social responsibility reporting in US pharmaceutical companies

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to compare “how we see ourselves” vs “how others see us” when communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in US pharmaceutical companies. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected as follows: CSR reports from the companies themselves and Business Press reports from the Lexis-Nexis database. NVivo content analysis was used to compare CSR communication by companies and the Business Press. This analysis was comprised of almost 10 million words. Comparisons of Carroll’s framework, including the economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic categories between CSR reports and the Business Press, were done. Additional analysis was done to discern individual, organizational, and societal patterns of communications. Return on assets was computed for companies that have formal CSR reports and those that do not. Findings The analysis of documents containing almost 10 million words allowed the following conclusions: companies communicate more about their economic and philanthropic activities, and the Business Press communicates more about their legal and ethical activities. The companies and the Business Press communicated similarly about individual CSR. The organization communicated more about organizational topics, and the Business Press communicated less about societal topics. Originality/value This paper makes both substantive and methodological contributions. Its substantive contribution allows an understanding of what pharmaceutical companies need to do to fully communicate their CSR activities. Its methodological contribution is in suggesting that content analysis be used in understanding communication patterns. A levels of analysis approach allowed the discernment of individual-oriented, organizational, and societal-oriented communication patterns.

Industry 4.0 and circular economy: An exploratory analysis of academic and practitioners' perspectives

“…To collect practitioner documents, we used the database Nexis Uni considering news articles containing public information about companies (Kim, Lee, Kim, Lee, & Suh, 2015). This database allows to obtain news, business and legal sources and has been used in similar studies (Brehmer, Podoynitsyna, & Langerak, 2018; Cook, LaVan, & Zilic, 2018). We collected data using the same word string used in the database Scopus.…”

An analysis of the ethical frameworks and financial outcomes of corporate social responsibility and business press reporting of US pharmaceutical companies

“…A variety of models have been used to describe the relationship of CSR to corporate governance. These include Carroll's CSR pyramid (Cook et al, 2018;Ehie, 2016). There are also a variety of stakeholder models (Dennehy, 2012;Leduc, 2004;Manetti and Toccafondi, 2012;Muthusamy and Negi, 2019;Papania et al, 2008;Turker and Altuntas, 2013;Yadav and Singh, 2016).…”

“…These include India (Amaladoss et al, 2011;Bird et al, 2016;Iqbal and Kakakhel, 2016;Mishra and Banerjee, 2019;Subramaniam et al, 2017), developed countries (Battaglia and Frey, 2014;Parsa et al, 2007;Paulet and Relano, 2012), and in developing countries (Darus et al, 2014;Ehie, 2016;ElGammal et al, 2018;Nkiko, 2013). Azim and Azam (2013), Carlat (2013), Mehta and Chandani (2015), Iqbal and Kakakhel (2016) and Cook et al (2018) are among a very few studies focusing specifically on the pharmaceutical sector.…”

Arbitration of accommodation in US workplaces: employee, stakeholder and human resources characteristics

“…While autocoding using NVivo or similar software is not widespread in the analysis of arbitration cases, it has been used to analyse a variety of similar documents: employment of individuals with mental illnesses (LaVan, 2019), employment litigation (Berrey et al ., 2012); ethics (Lock and Seele, 2015); and social responsibility reporting in financial statements (Huhmann and Conner, 2014). Moreover, it has been recommended as a multimethod approach to data analysis of qualitative data (Cook et al ., 2018; Irvine et al ., 2018; Maher et al ., 2018; Vogel et al ., 2018). It has also been used to conduct similar research internationally (Nardodkar et al ., 2016).…”