Bridging the Gap between Ethical Consumers and Corporate Social Responsibility: An International Comparison of Consumer-oriented CSR Rating Systems

Jones, Ellis

doi:10.9774/gleaf.4700.2017.ma.00005

Cited by 6 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…This distinction may be lost on consumers, but it is not insignificant. Even third-party ecolabels vary in terms of how comprehensive and rigorous their criteria are (Bartley and Smith 2010; Cohn and O’Rourke 2011; Ingenbleek and Meulenberg 2006; Jones 2017; Nadvi 2008).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Transparency at this level is required as it would allow for a comprehensive comparison with the practices of similar companies competing in the same product categories. Some of this work is currently being done by EC rating systems, but these efforts suffer from a combination of a lack of verifiable CSR data (Schäfer 2005) and methodological standardization (Jones 2017). To be effective, company-level environmental data would likely need to be reported annually to a government agency in a way that could be audited by researchers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Company-level data are, generally speaking, more readily available, and in a more detailed form, than either product-level data, or industry-level data. The majority of studies using company-level data rely on data sets generated by socially responsible investment (SRI) ratings agencies (Orlitzky, Schmidt, and Rynes 2003), which are both consistent and readily available, if somewhat problematic due to financial conflicts of interest, questionable validity, and a basic lack of verifiability (Chelli and Gendron 2013; Jones 2017; Ramus and Montiel 2005).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A total of 106 companies were common to all four systems and were organized for each system into quintiles. The standardized ratings of the companies were analyzed for distribution skew, standard deviation, outlier patterns, significant overall variances (using analysis of variance [ANOVA], Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD), and Scheffe’s Tests), and variance related to company size (see Jones 2017).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking Greenwashing: Corporate Discourse, Unethical Practice, and the Unmet Potential of Ethical Consumerism

Jones

2019

Sociological Perspectives

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Utilizing data drawn from online and print advertisements, this research compares the green advertising techniques of companies with well-documented strong and weak social and environmental track records. Notwithstanding more subtle, divergent narratives suggesting that more responsible companies direct the consumer gaze toward more political and systemic issues while their counterparts tend to emphasize relatively low-cost, scientific, and philanthropic efforts, the main findings indicate that all companies employ a very similar grand narrative focused on consumer empowerment regardless of their actual ethical track record. This suggests that most attempts, by consumers and scholars alike, to determine anything meaningful about actual corporate practices via an analysis of environmental advertising, may be largely futile. A dramaturgical framework is employed to argue that the findings are most suitably explained by reframing green advertising as a form of impression management for an audience of ethical consumers. Thus, greenwashing emerges only when such performances are contradicted by a company’s actual environmental track record. The author proposes a more relational definition of greenwashing to reorient the analytical focus on the processes behind, and connections between, the product, the company, and the industry, including their broader cultural context.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking Greenwashing: Corporate Discourse, Unethical Practice, and the Unmet Potential of Ethical Consumerism

Jones

2019

Sociological Perspectives

Self Cite

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“…Practitioners and scholars have made considerable efforts to measure CSR (Jones 2017), ranging from a CSR ranking based on numeric values for each possible ''good practice'' of a firm (as identified by some authoritative body) with an accompanying summative score (Chen et al 2013), to counting the number of company policies for each identified area of concern (Welford 2005). Consulting organizations have emerged with guidelines on measuring and reporting of CSRrelated practices and their outcomes, usually referred to as CSP (Corporate Social Performance).…”

Section: Measuring Csrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring patterns of corporate social responsibility using a complementary K-means clustering criterion

Taran

Mirkin

2020

Bus Res

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Companies’ objectives extend beyond mere profitability, to what is generally known as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Empirical research effort of CSR is typically concentrated on a limited number of aspects. We focus on the whole set of CSR activities to identify any structure to that set. In this analysis, we take data from 1850 of the largest international companies via the conventional MSCI database and focus on four major dimensions of CSR: Environment, Social/Stakeholder, Labor, and Governance. To identify any structure hidden in almost constant average values, we apply the popular technique of K-means clustering. When determining the number of clusters, which is especially difficult in the case at hand, we use an equivalent clustering criterion that is complementary to the square-error K-means criterion. Our use of this complementary criterion aims at obtaining clusters that are both large and farthest away from the center. We derive from this a method of extracting anomalous clusters one-by-one with a follow-up removal of small clusters. This method has allowed us to discover a rather impressive process of change from predominantly uniform patterns of CSR activities along the four dimensions in 2007 to predominantly single-focus patterns of CSR activities in 2012. This change may reflect the dynamics of increasingly interweaving and structuring CSR activities into business processes that are likely to be extended into the future.

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Does doing good do well? An investigation into the relationship between consumer buying behavior and CSR

Kraus

Cane

Soriano

2021

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged globally as an important field of study as corporations increasingly recognize the positive consequences of ethical behavior in their business operations. However, despite a growing body of literature, results and definitions remain somewhat contradictory and fractured. Taking a marketing business ethics perspective, this article examines the influence of CSR in firms and its impact on consumer buying behavior through a systematic examination of state of the art literature over the past two decades . Our review identifies a theoretical connection between CSR initiatives and positive consumer reaction yet a lack of material relevance. Most publications have assumed linear and rational decision-making, and comparative studies addressing contextual factors e.g. culture are lacking. Following from this, our paper addresses the results and implications of CSR activities concerning these elements and creates a new framework through which consumer behavior can be analyzed.

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Bridging the Gap between Ethical Consumers and Corporate Social Responsibility: An International Comparison of Consumer-oriented CSR Rating Systems

Cited by 6 publications

References 87 publications

Rethinking Greenwashing: Corporate Discourse, Unethical Practice, and the Unmet Potential of Ethical Consumerism

Rethinking Greenwashing: Corporate Discourse, Unethical Practice, and the Unmet Potential of Ethical Consumerism

Exploring patterns of corporate social responsibility using a complementary K-means clustering criterion

Does doing good do well? An investigation into the relationship between consumer buying behavior and CSR

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