CSR and sustainable development: are the concepts compatible?

Abstract

PurposeIn France, an application decree from February 2002 enumerates a series of operational indicators that companies must offer, including a number of accounting and financial items. The information expected notably includes working time organisation, gender equality, health and safety, disability policies, subcontractor arrangements, water, raw material and energy consumption and biodiversity efforts. The present study aims to account for the diversity of the social and environmental information that companies supply by focusing on three stakeholder categories: suppliers; customers; and employees. It also seeks to highlight possible variations among different sectors of activity; influence of three pillars of sustainability (economic, social and environmental); timeframe (short‐term, long‐term, analytical); and type of discourse (situational or action variables).Design/methodology/approachBased on 40 French companies as a qualitative approach, the purpose of the present communication is to offer a discussion of the structuring modes applied to the information found in sustainability reports targeting stakeholders for all the companies belonging to the CAC 40 index.FindingsMobilizing a structural contents analysis, its findings identify differentiated communications practices among the 40 companies in question. The study also unveils the existence of shorter‐term approaches to sustainability action, contrasting to more long‐term and/or analytical orientations. Finally, the reports in question all emphasized sustainability's “economic” dimension, with its “social” dimension being considered secondary and its “environmental” dimension coming last. This inquiry demonstrates that, in the French context, there is a far cry from corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimension and sustainable development (SD) vision.Originality/valueThe paper provides an in‐depth method to analyze CSR and SD reports through its structural discourse.

Does It Pay to Disclose CSR Information? Evidence from French Companies

“…Recent studies have shown a possibility of tying corporate governance to CSR through shareholding structures and the presence of external directors on the board (Barnea and Rubin, 2010;Hollandts et al, 2011). This kind of disclosure enables stakeholders to gain a better understanding of executive governance and control and obtain information about how a firm is being managed and how it engages with society (Capron, 2011;Husser et al, 2012). Disclosing detailed information to all relevant parties appears to be more useful than isolated measures relating to governance mechanisms, such as a board size, composition, and/or executive compensation (Ben Barka and Hermalin and Weisbach, 2012).…”

Vállalati felelősségvállalás és fogyatékossággal élő személyek foglalkoztatása: külön múlt – közös jövő? – 2. rész: A fogyatékossággal élő személyek foglalkoztatása a CSR-szakirodalomban és a gyakorlatban

“…A szakirodalmi keresés alapján az anyavállalati hatás, valamint a nemzetközi iránymutatások hatása is jelentős lehet (Husser et al, 2012). Ez a jelenség a CSR-kutatások alapján általánosságban hazánkban is kimutatható (Bank, 2017), de a mi eseteinkben is speciálisan kirajzolódott.…”

Historical Development of the Corporate Social Responsibility Concept

“…Jocelyn Hosser studied the historical development of the concept of CSR during the past five decades [5]. It was concluded from her study that there are many deficiencies in listing the factors that affect the development of corporate social responsibility.…”