Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation (CSRR) : do companies comply with their raised CSR expectations?

This paper develops the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility reputation (CSRR) both theoretically and empirically. The first part examines the literature on CSRR extensively in an attempt to develop both a qualitative and a quantitative interpretation to measure CSRR. The new aspect of this paper is the explicit modelling of the confrontation of CSR expectations and CSR performance. Crisp and Fuzzy models were subsequently explored. A sample of 2,447 firms covering approximately 176 survey questions on corporate social responsibility, obtained from 29 countries, was then implemented to measure CSRR per company, per country and per sector. On average, companies were found to comply with their expectations. In conclusion – as based on our model – Europe was found to be the best CSRR ranked continent, and the United Kingdom and Finland the top ranked countries. We also found the ‘utilities’ sector to be the best ranked sector, with ‘health care’ and ‘financials’ at the lowest end of the distribution.