Dimensions of CSR Disclosures: Are They Converging, Diverging, or Crossverging?

Abstract

Academics have debated whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices are global, regional, or crossverging in nature. Prior CSR literature has primarily focused on single-country and on predominantly developed country samples. Another issue has been the use of aggregate CSR to the neglect of different discrete dimensions of CSR such as environment, employees, anti-corruption, human rights, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and health, In this paper we test whether these aforementioned aspects of CSR disclosures are converging (global), diverging (regional), or crossverging (hybrid) on a sample of 335 multinational enterprises (MNEs) from 31 countries from three regions of the world: Europe, Anglo-Saxon cluster, and Asia and the emerging markets. Using all six individual components of CSR as dependent variables, MANCOVA procedure indicated that there are regional differences. The overall findings of the study imply that on all six individual dimensions of CSR disclosures the divergence hypothesis was supported.