Measuring the immeasurable?

Abstract

The governance gap and regulatory failure associated with economic globalization are well discussed in the literature. 10 This inability of governments to hold corporations accountable through democratic institutions and processes led to increasing public discontent in the 1990s. As civil society organizations became increasingly frustrated with corporate unaccountability and governmental inaction, they began to bypass the political level by targeting corporations directly. Through "naming and shaming," boycotts, demonstrations and confrontational tactics, NGOs managed to attack corporate brands, legitimacy, and in some instances corporate profits. CSR emerged as a corporate response to these civil society pressures. While the term "CSR" appeared as early as the 1950s, 11 its present form is closely linked to the anti-globalization movement beginning in the 1990s. 12 CSR is most commonly defined as going "beyond compliance," that is, practices where companies voluntarily improve their social and environmental performance. 13 Furthermore, CSR is understood to be "beyond charity," as it concerns how companies integrate social and environmental concerns into their core business operations. 14 The debates on CSR and on global governance are becoming increasingly intertwined. 15 In many instances, CSR initiatives simply consist of unilateral or ad hoc projects from single companies, such as developing a code of conduct, a CSR report, or specific projects to improve social and environmental practices in the company without any wider governance implications. However, several CSR initiatives have started out as or developed into soft law institutions with coregulation through multi-stakeholder participation and monitoring of compliance. These initiatives range from very loose soft law arrangements like the UN Global Compact, with weak compliance mechanisms, to more stringent initiatives, like the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Thus, the boundary between CSR initiatives and soft law is often blurred. 16 Some of the soft law initiatives that originated out of the CSR movement, like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), have even acquired hard law characteristics. These transitions between CSR, soft law and hard law, indicate that CSR is indeed relevant to the study of global governance and that the

International Social Comparisons of Corporate Responsibility

“…Based on Gjølberg's work [8], we presented an analytical score for global CSR per country, using international renowned rankings already present in the literature. Variations of the formula were tried to test for the robustness of the ranking obtained.…”

“…This score and the indexes included follow the work of Gjølberg [8]. To be considered, an index had to report some aspect of CSR and to be composed of at least 100 companies.…”

“…Once all data relating to these indexes (i=1…7) is gathered, the value of CSR in each country (j=1…4) is computed using the following expression [8]. Some variations to expression (1) are additionally considered.…”

Online Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in the Croatian Banking Sector

“…There are significant differences in the type of socially responsible activity depending on sector and national context (Gjølberg, 2009). A modern CSR practice in banks is focused on investment policy -as the external aspect of corporate social responsibility, and resource utilization policy -as an internal aspect.…”

An analysis of corporate social responsibility in Brazil: growth, firm size, sector and internal stakeholders involved in policy definition

“…International evidence shows that country characteristics may have a role on firms' CSR (Baughn, Bodie, & McIntosh, 2007;Gjølberg, 2009 …”