Some don’t even report it and most fail to achieve their primary goal for doing CSR, argue Alnoor Bhimani, Hanna Silvola and Prabhu Sivabalan.
The traditional perspective for engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) assumes that early adopters are more authentic than late adopters. Why? Those that fear their operations aren’t CSR friendly take longer to bend to the will of external stakeholders, and report later. On the other hand, “best practice” organisations release CSR reports in advance of stakeholder expectations, taking advantage of their strengths to engender goodwill amongst regulators, customers and society. To what extent however, might this actually be the case?