Analysing the corporate responsibility Web pages of consumer electronics companies: implications for process improvement

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a set of principles and practices that encourages companies to be responsibile for the impact that their activities have on society. CSR positions are publicly communicated through information usually made available through corporate Web sites. Previous studies have shown that these are heterogeneous in the way they present the companies as socially responsible. This paper reports an exploratory study on these differences and their relation to diverse CSR-related indexes and rankings in a sample of consumer electronic companies that participate in the Greener Electronic Guide. The ISO 26000 standard is used to analyse the core subjects that are explicitly mentioned in corporate Web pages and how they relate to the scores obtained in the mentioned Guide and other rankings and indexes available. Results obtained point out to a positive correlation between environmental issues and overall CSR behaviour, but differences indicate a need for further research. That behaviour in turn appears to be related to how CSR is communicated externally through corporate Web sites to some extent, but differences are also apparent. This may have potential implications for process improvement. Concretely, in that higher levels of transparency in communication may be achieved by aligning common processes with actual CSR actions more closely, including communication processes.