Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility Activities in Greece in a Period of a Prolonged Economic Crisis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of companies operating in Greece in the field of CSR, which have voluntarily participated for evaluation under the international tool titled Corporate Responsibility Index (CR Index). CR Index assesses companies based on their performance in CSR activities related to society, environment, market and employees. A well defined period of 6 years since the adoption of CRI in Greece is examined for 26 participating companies, starting in 2008. The paper follows a content analysis approach. The findings shed light to the limited existing literature on the influence of the economic crisis of a country on the allocation of CSR activities. The findings indicate that the participating companies become more effective in regard to their CSR activities since there is a significant qualitative difference between pre-crisis CSR practices and the one reported after. Moreover, our study shows a bidirectional influence process between companies and the society in which they operate, if we take into consideration that, despite the economic crisis and the companies significant drop in profits, they become more efficient and are highly evaluated. Nonetheless, the content analysis illustrated that companies could further communicate and promote CSR activities to the society’ since they have not fully done so. This is so because the communication of the CRI in the companies’ corporate websites and the reference in the awards received appears to be limited in the companies’ corporate websites.