Abstract
Businesses are facing consistent pressures from stakeholders to be socially responsible although the economic benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been found to be mixed. We aim to reveal stakeholders’ motivations for demanding CSR by studying stakeholders’ stated preferences on companies’ contribution to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in three different contexts, purchasing, investing, and job-seeking. We conducted conjoint survey experiments—embedded information treatments targeting the public in Japan (n = 12,098) in 2019 and 2020. The results showed that stakeholders demanded corporations to contribute to international-related issues rather than domestic-related issues. Stakeholders’ support was low when the companies profited from contributing to the SDGs. These results suggest that social context reflects the preferences of stakeholders on corporates’ SDG activities. Overall, raising awareness had effects on stakeholders’ support and to what extent the information affected the decisions of stakeholders was varied by stakeholders.
Highlights
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is demanded by society [1,2] and it has become indispensable for businesses to comply with societal expectations regarding corporate practice [3]
Is pushing corporations to get involved in CSR create a sustainable future? Bénabou and Tirole (2010) attempted to classify the visions for CSR into three categories: (1) corporations make a profit through doing socially good, (2) stakeholders such as investors, employees, and consumers demand corporations do socially good on behalf of them, and (3) corporate insiders do socially good to fulfill their prosocial preferences rather than maximizing corporation’s profit, which is called insider-initiated corporate philanthropy [1]
We especially focus on the situation where corporations incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 internationally agreed global goals to be achieved by 2030
Summary
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is demanded by society [1,2] and it has become indispensable for businesses to comply with societal expectations regarding corporate practice [3]. While the public sees it as a positive cause, some economists claim negative aspects of CSR [4] This is illustrated by a study that shows that CSR benefits firms by profiting, but employees have to compensate by accepting lower income [5]. Development of Sustainable Development Concept and Studies on Individuals’ Prosocial Behavior. At the Millennium summit in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a predecessor of the SDGs, were agreed by all the United Nations member states to address social economic and environmental challenges of developing countries [14]. The economics discipline has provided a large body of contributions on these broad sustainable development challenges; the sustainable development-related field in economics has not yet become mainstream. Economic activities play a large role in harming ecological system; there is an urgent need to mainstream sustainable development studies into core discussions of economics [17]
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