Soccer fields? What for? Effectiveness of corporate social responsibility initiatives in the mining industry

Abstract

While there is significant research regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the mining industry, there is a lack of understanding in terms of the actual effectiveness of CSR initiatives disclosed by these companies. This paper aims to examine the perceptions of stakeholders in the mining industry regarding the intended results of CSR initiatives. Results show three ineffective situations that emerged from empirical contrasts of CSR initiatives declared by mining companies in sustainability reports and the actual impact on beneficiaries in communities: (1) failure of the CSR initiatives to contribute to real community beneficiary needs; (2) failure of the CSR initiatives to adjust to the socio-cultural characteristics of the beneficiary group; and (3) failure of the CSR initiatives to ensure sustainability in the long run.This study contributes to the literature on CSR initiative effectiveness and provides suggestions for mining managers, government, and policymakers.

Corporate social reporting and assurance: The state of the art

“…On the other hand, and as a consequence of the results of previous studies in which a lack of credibility regarding the CSR information is identified along with a reduced involvement of the stakeholders (i.e., Devenin & Bianchi, 2018;Haller, van Staden & Landis, 2016;Noronha, Leung & Lei, 2015;Sharif Mahmud Khalid, Atkins & Barone, 2019), a growing number of authors have begun to analyse the use that the companies make of the CSR information they release, arguing that they are efforts to legitimize themselves before society or to manipulate the opinion of different interest groups. In general, the results suggest practices of obfuscation in the information disclosed, which results in problems of comparability and verifiability.…”

Improving environmental management through indigenous peoples’ involvement

“…Second, corporate disclosures on sustainability issues-including relationships with indigenous communities-are often opaque, biased, and mostly intended to serve business interests rather than communicate transparent information to stakeholders (Kitula, 2006;Meesters and Behagel, 2017;Parsons, 2008;Wang et al, 2016;Whiteman, 2009). This lack of transparency provides support for the perspective that corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are above all used as a marketing tool to control stakeholder perceptions (Basu et al, 2015;Coronado and Fallon, 2010;Devenin and Bianchi, 2018;Parsons, 2008). Third, CSR initiatives have been criticized for their superficiality and lack of substantial benefits for local populations (Kepore et al, 2013;Whitmore, 2006).…”

Cultural organizations, digital Corporate Social Responsibility and stakeholder engagement in virtual museums: a multiple case study. How digitization is influencing the attitude toward CSR

“…The paper does not fail to mention the main risk involved in such process, which is that of taking a mild, cosmetic or even plainly hypocritical approach to the issue (La Cour & Kromann, 2011), one that in other words is not radical enough to exploit all possibilities offered by digital platforms in terms of accountability and stakeholder engagement. This study contributes to the literature on CSR effectiveness (Devenin & Bianchi, 2018) in cultural organizations (Burns et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2019;Hofstede et al, 2005;Hur & Kim, 2017;Kucharska & Kowalczyk, 2018) and on how digitization (Haddock-Fraser, 2012;Mura, Longo, Domingues, & Zanni, 2019) is influencing the attitude toward CSR (Vollero et al, 2020), in order to provide suggestions for cultural managers, scholars, policymakers and practitioners alike. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only study that applies this perspective to the analysis of the digitization process through CSR, currently under way across cultural institutions around the world.…”