Two essays on the nature and practice of corporate social responsibility

Abstract

Corporate social reporting is the voluntary disclosure of corporate social performance information to the general public. Although the idea of corporate social reporting was first discussed in the late 1960s, the practice did not take root until the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the number of corporate social reports published annually has been steadily increasing, suggesting that corporate social reporting is slowly moving toward being an accepted business practice. In this proposal, which is composed of two essays, I explore the moral and behavioral underpinnings of corporate social reporting. In the first essay, I use a contractarian approach to propose a set of hypernorms for business ethics that consists of competitive and cooperative principles. The principles are developed using arguments from integrative social contracts theory, game theory, and the theory of institutions. Then, from the proposed hypernorms, I derive a contractarian statement of corporate social responsibility that specifies a hierarchy of moral obligations for the firm. In the second essay, I conduct an empirical examination of the determinants of corporate social reporting. I argue that firms initially publish corporate social reports to respond to legitimacy challenges arising from three firm-specific characteristics: business exposure, public awareness, and past performance. I then draw upon institutional theory to hypothesize that firms will eventually issue social reports to enhance their legitimacy through isomorphism, thereby diluting the explanatory power of firm-specific characteristics over time.