Exploring the Substance and Stakeholder Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility: An Expansion of Carroll’s Discretionary Expectations

Abstract

The research seeks to contribute to a more specific operationalization and measurement of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) construct as traditionally defined in the literature. In particular, we explore the expansion of Carroll's (1979; 2008) seminal philanthropic/discretionary category of social responsibilities to include broader environmental, human rights and stakeholder interests. A new multi-dimensional scale is proposed and tested. The efficacy of this scale is examined by measuring CSR perceptions among a young college educated population at multiple levels of analysis. Internationally, we look at the CSR orientations of students in the United States and China. Within the United States, we focus on the states of Utah and Oregon. Our findings suggest that dominant existing frameworks could be improved through greater specification of substantive issues areas and stakeholder interests. Findings also suggest single level analyses may ignore important variation in CSR perceptions across geographical/cultural boundaries. In particular, significant subnational (within country) variation in attitudes and perspectives exist. Future research should include not only refinement of the scale introduced in this paper, but additional testing to determine whether the underlying measurement model holds and has explanatory power.