Corporate Social Responsibility Activity Combinations for Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Korean Firms

Jinhwan Kim,Hyukjun Kwon,Hyeob Kim

doi:10.3390/su11247078

Abstract

We examine how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities yield high performance in Korean companies by addressing two related questions to expand our limited knowledge. First, what combinations of CSR activities yield high performance? Second, how do CSR activities form an interdependent system based on different corporate contexts? We draw the 2012–2018 data from the Korean Economic Justice Institute index for a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results reveal several effective CSR activity factor combinations under the given strategies and management environments. Companies with a high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with a low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies with a low financial performance from CSR activities, most of the causal pathways focus only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities’ combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies’ strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.

Highlights

In recent years, managers have been required to gain profound and nuanced comprehension of strategic environments and practices to achieve increasingly complex economic, environmental, and social goals [1]
This study investigated combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities that are effective in achieving corporate sustainability
We aimed to provide empirical evidence indicating that the combination of CSR activities supports and identifies complementary constructs

Summary

Introduction

Managers have been required to gain profound and nuanced comprehension of strategic environments and practices to achieve increasingly complex economic, environmental, and social goals [1]. Research on CSR as a sustainability practice has largely clarified three positions: That CSR activities contribute to increased corporate value [6,7,8,9], that the converse negatively affects corporate value [10,11], and that CSR activities do not have any effect on corporate value [12,13]. These propositions have been converging toward a singular argument: Recent CSR activities have had positive effects on corporate performance

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Methods

Results

Conclusion