The Assessment of Quantity, Diversity and Quality of CSR Reports in Canadian Food Retailing: A Comparative Study Among and Between Retailers Using Content Analysis

Abstract

This content analysis study assesses the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of Canada’s top food retailers for quantity, diversity and quality. Given a responsibility for food retailers to be accountable in how they operate their business, CSR reporting is the retailer’s way of publicly disclosing their social and environmental operations. Although previous studies have looked at the CSR of food retailers, none has investigated Canadian retailers. This study uses a modified consolidated narrative interrogation (CONI) method (Beck et al., 2010). Key results include that CSR reports contain higher Quantity Indices related to the social dimension than the environmental dimension, larger retailers overall display higher Diversity and Quality Indices than smaller retailers, and retailers report on the same CSR topics due to having shared stakeholders. The results of the study also indicate there is room for improvement in the quality and diversity of CSR reports, and quantity, diversity, and quality of CSR reports have a wide variation.