IT Knowledge Management: Extending Principals of CSR

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is no more a luxury but a must that will ensure the inclusion of the population and the sustainability of resources. It is a voluntaries integration by companies of social and environmental concerns into their strategy and their stakeholder's relations. This paper, through the literature review, allows, as a first step, to find similarities in each decade of CSR definitions and to highlight how theorists evolve in defining the concept. The objective of the research is to identify the gap in developing countries, by ranking companies according to their CSR perception, and how they link this discipline to doing business. The purpose is to highlight the decennial gap, mainly when CSR is defined more as philanthropies acts, without any coercive system that strives for companies to comply with CSR values. The problems can be summarised in the following question: Is CSR having the same perception in developing countries? If there is a hole, how many years represent this gap according to different segments of companies? The paper presents the result of empirical analysis relied into qualitative study that targeted the companies from different sizes. The random sample is complicated to apply since the proportion of SMBs is very high, and therefore the results can be biased and cannot be generalised. Thus, the choice is about convenience sample of a total of 80 companies surveyed regarding awareness of CSR as a concept, Kind of applied purposes, CSR motivations, CSR brakes and CSR perspectives. The use of IT knowledge management allows us to find similarities between these perceptions and different categories of companies. As the first conclusion, a reverted triangle confirms that the small and tiny companies, still have the 70's perception of CSR, as a voluntaries commitment, and they represent the most significant proportion of firms. At the opposite, large companies and Moroccan subcontractor companies, that represent deficient proportion (5%) perceive CSR as an imperative of survival and are in the same trend as the global vision of CSR. So, as an answer of the problematic, the perception is not the same for the small companies but tend to be the same as the international perception once they are larger or they are doing business with the international market. The results of this research can be useful for abroad companies that need to know about the Moroccan vision of CSR, or for sensibilization of local companies regarding the gap that needs to fill in Keywords CSR, developing countries, evolution, IT knowledge management.