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AbstractA Comparative Study on the Perception of Corporate Social Responsibility by General Public, NGO, and Corporate PR PractitionersLee, Hyun-ou Kim, Hyung-suk
Recently, the concept of ‘corporate social responsibility (CSR)’ has received a wide attention from various academic fields as modern society requires corporations to take part more actively in building a better living environment. Since Carroll’s (1979) pioneering work on this subject, CSR has been known to be a multi-dimensional construct consisting of economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary responsibilities. However, in spite of common understanding regarding the concept of CSR, there is a paucity of empirical research measuring the concept directly. This tendency is due to the fact that a valid scale measuring CSR empirically is hard to find up to now. Backdrop to this, this study endeavors to develop a measurement scale for CSR by combining the existing body of literature on this subject with the result of the content analysis on the websites of Korean 100 corporations. Consequently, a 20-item instrument designed to measure 4 dimensions of CSR is developed. By utilizing a newly developed scale, this study found that Korean people value legal responsibility of corporation higher than economic responsibility of corporation. Since this finding is counterintuitive to Carroll’s original expectations, this paper challenges the notion of universality of Carroll’s hierarchical model of CSR. Moreover, this study also witnessed that the perception of CSR hinges on the types of audiences. Specifically, while NGO members have most critical views regarding the activities of CSR, corporate PR practitioners have most positive views, with the general publics standing in-between. Upon the tests of four research questions drawn for the study, detailed implications for future corporate communication were addressed. Key words : corporate social responsibility, perception, comparison |
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