Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting is becoming mainstream, yet there is limited research on whether and how CSR reports communicate value relevant information. We examine the effects of ...CSR report readability and tone on future CSR performance and the market reaction around the release of CSR reports. Using a hand-collected dataset of Fortune 500 companies that published stand-alone CSR reports from 2002 to 2014, we find that 1-year-ahead CSR performance is positively associated with the changes in both CSR report readability and tone, suggesting that more readable text and more optimistic tone in a firm’s CSR report are indicative of better future CSR performance. Furthermore, consistent with the view that CSR reports communicate important value relevant information to the market, we document significant market reactions to report readability and tone around the release of CSR reports. Additional analyses suggest that CSR report readability enhances the association between the abnormal returns and the change in CSR report tone, and that the market reaction to CSR report readability is more pronounced for firms with lower analyst following and higher financial opacity. Taken together, our results substantiate the important roles of CSR report readability and tone in communicating future CSR performance and imparting value relevant information to the market.
An increasing number of teen plastic surgeries, silent family dinners, fake news, and widespread political polarization. What do they have in common? According to the Social Dilemma documentary, ...these phenomena are all intricately linked to the dominant role of social media in shaping individual behaviors and the collective world we live in. The Social Dilemma, directed by Jef Orlowski and released on Netfix in September 2020, portrays a fearsome digital Frankenstein of social media, zooming in on a plethora of debilitating efects it inficts upon individuals and the society. Technology can be an emancipatory, democratizing tool, capable of empowering individuals to achieve their goals and fulfll their dreams. Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Google’s is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The best thing is—these services are free. Or are they really free? The Social Dilemma pulls back the curtain of big tech’s lofty missions and free services to reveal an exploitative proft-maximization machine that is getting more and more powerful.An increasing number of teen plastic surgeries, silent family dinners, fake news, and widespread political polarization. What do they have in common? According to the Social Dilemma documentary, these phenomena are all intricately linked to the dominant role of social media in shaping individual behaviors and the collective world we live in. The Social Dilemma, directed by Jef Orlowski and released on Netfix in September 2020, portrays a fearsome digital Frankenstein of social media, zooming in on a plethora of debilitating efects it inficts upon individuals and the society. Technology can be an emancipatory, democratizing tool, capable of empowering individuals to achieve their goals and fulfll their dreams. Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Google’s is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The best thing is—these services are free. Or are they really free? The Social Dilemma pulls back the curtain of big tech’s lofty missions and free services to reveal an exploitative proft-maximization machine that is getting more and more powerful.
Like most technologies, AI is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it promises scientific miracles, efficiency, and freedom; on the other hand, it is fraught with a host of ethical challenges, ...including algorithmic bias, data privacy and security, lack of diversity and inclusion in AI technology, and potential to create largescale unemployment (Du and Xie 2021; Puntoni et al. 2021) and even threaten human extinction, as feared by many leading technologists (Center for AI Safety 2023). Increasingly, executives, researchers, and policy makers agree on the urgent need to manage and regulate AI to best realize its benefits while mitigating its risks. As businesses race to lead on AI, a productive path to socially responsible AI needs to involve not just AI executives, researchers, and engineers but also business scholars, philosophers, sociologists, ethicists, policy makers, consumer advocates, and nonprofits. Corporate social responsibility (CSR), with its rich accumulated insights from research at the intersection of business and society, provides a unique and valuable lens to address the tension between the promises versus perils of AI.
This research investigates the interplay between leadership styles and institutional corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. A large-scale field survey of managers reveals that firms with ...greater transformational leadership are more likely to engage in institutional CSR practices, whereas transactional leadership is not associated with such practices. Furthermore, stakeholder-oriented marketing reinforces the positive link between transformational leadership and institutional CSR practices. Finally, transactional leadership enhances, whereas transformational leadership diminishes, the positive relationship between institutional CSR practices and organizational outcomes. This research highlights the differential roles that transformational and transactional leadership styles play for a firm's institutional CSR practices and has significant implications for theory and practice.
By engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, companies can not only generate favorable stakeholder attitudes and better support behaviors (e.g. purchase, seeking employment, ...investing in the company), but also, over the long run, build corporate image, strengthen stakeholder–company relationships, and enhance stakeholders' advocacy behaviors. However, stakeholders' low awareness of and unfavorable attributions towards companies' CSR activities remain critical impediments in companies' attempts to maximize business benefits from their CSR activities, highlighting a need for companies to communicate CSR more effectively to stakeholders. In light of these challenges, a conceptual framework of CSR communication is presented and its different aspects are analyzed, from message content and communication channels to company‐ and stakeholder‐specific factors that influence the effectiveness of CSR communication.
This research builds on the complementary corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures in strategy and marketing to provide insight into the efficacy of CSR as a challenger's competitive weapon ...against a market leader. Through an investigation of a real-world CSR initiative, we show that the challenger can reap superior business returns (i.e., more positive attitudinal and behavioral outcomes) among consumers who had participated in its CSR initiative, relative to those who were merely aware of the initiative. Specifically, participant consumers demonstrate the desired attitudinal and behavioral changes in favor of the challenger, regardless of their affective trust in the leader, whereas aware consumers' reactions become less favorable as their affective trust in the leader increases. Furthermore, participant consumers, but not aware ones, form a communal, trust-based bond with the challenger.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
This research examines the moderating influence of the extent to which a brand's social initiatives are integrated into its competitive positioning (i.e., a CSR positioning) on consumer reactions to ...CSR. We find that positive CSR beliefs held by consumers are associated not only with greater purchase likelihood but also with longer-term loyalty and advocacy behaviors. More importantly, we find that not all CSR initiatives are created equal: a brand that positions itself on CSR, integrating its CSR strategy with its core business strategy, is more likely than brands that merely engage in CSR to reap a range of CSR-specific benefits in the consumer domain.
Products and services empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming widespread in today’s marketplace. However, consumers have mixed feelings about AI technologies due to the numerous ...ethical challenges associated the development and deployment of AI. Drawing upon prior research on the moral significance of technology and the emerging literature on AI, we delineate three key dimensions of AI-enabled products (i.e., multi-functionality, interactivity, and AI intelligence stage) that have relevance for ethical implications and adopt a socio-technical approach to provide a multi-layered ethical analysis of AI products at the product-, consumer-, and society-levels. Some key ethical issues identified in the paper include AI biases, ethical design, consumer privacy, cybersecurity, individual autonomy and wellbeing, and unemployment. Companies need to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) to shape the future of ethical AI; drawing upon stakeholder theory and institutional theory, we develop a conceptual framework on AI-related CSR, highlighting the product-, company-, and institutional environment-specific factors that influence firms’ socially responsible actions in the domain of AI and discussing the subsequent outcomes for firm, consumers, and the society. We include a section on future research agenda for AI ethics and firm CSR in this important domain.
This research investigates the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm innovation. Drawing upon the literatures on CSR and the knowledge-based view, we conceptualize that a firm's ...CSR programs enable it to build broader and deeper relationship networks with its stakeholders, facilitating the sharing and exchange of external knowledge of its stakeholders; in turn, stakeholders' external knowledge complements the firm's internal knowledge and promotes firm innovation. Using a large scale data set compiled from various archival sources, our empirical results show that firms with greater CSR activities exhibit higher innovativeness capability and launch more new products. Furthermore, we show that this positive relationship between CSR and firm innovation is stronger for firms with higher R&D investment and firms operating in more competitive markets. This research broadens current understanding of the business returns to CSR, suggesting that CSR can be a catalyst for innovation.
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