An Analysis of Best Practice Patterns for Corporate Social Responsibility in Top IT Companies

Abstract

In order to show their compliance with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals, companies report their "sustainable initiatives" into their CSR reports. However, from small companies to multinational, it is hard to see the real benefits of sustainable strategies' implementation, since there are actually no general patterns defined which can ensure high impacts on sustainability. Moreover, there are few metrics and process to assess the efficiency of a sustainability strategy, but the different studies made in that field can show different results, this induces a part of uncertainty to evaluate the performance of a sustainable strategy. Therefore, in this paper, we contribute a pattern approach to implementing sustainability in a company. To do that, we performed an analysis of the 25 CSR reports coming from the 25 biggest companies in the IT sector in order to extract sustainability patterns that are provided in an online catalog to (1) give first tracks to companies which would engage in sustainability initiatives and do not really know where to start; and (2) to give an indicator to companies who already have taken up sustainability initiatives and would like to establish an evaluation of it.Technologies 2018, 6, 76 2 of 22 reports in an IT company context. Meaning that there is no research investigating best practices in CSR strategies. Second, which is quite related to the first one, we realized that there is no general set of ready-to-implement sustainable strategies at a global level, most of the research focusing on the impact of a specific initiative or on a specific impact coming from different initiatives. Therefore, our research objective is to extract general patterns showing high impacts on sustainability at an IT company level.Therefore, our main research question will be what an IT company can do as a means to improve its sustainability. We decomposed this question into four sub-questions:

Online Company Reputation—A Thorny Problem for Optimizing Corporate Sustainability

“…Companies engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to show that they are legitimate and to enhance their online reputation. Both practitioners and theorists agree that the goals pursued by companies through CSR are to promote management based on the values spread within the organization and to improve their online reputation [9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

Legislation, Regulations, and Reflections on Environmental Accounting as a Reflection of the Incorporation of Social Responsibility in Companies

“…In order to show their compliance with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals, companies report their "sustainable initiatives" in their CSR reports. However, from small companies to multinational, it is hard to recognize the real benefits of sustainable strategies' implementation, since there are actually no general patterns defined which can ensure high impacts on sustainability (Déroche and Penzenstadler 2018).…”