Factors Influencing Modes of Implementation of CSR Initiatives

Abstract

Prior literature on corporate social responsibility has extensively explained its antecedents and outcomes, but more needs to be known about CSR implementation and its synthesis with practice. This study fills this research gap first by explaining the various CSR implementation modes and further by examining the factors influencing the choice of CSR implementation modes. The firms use three modes to implement CSR initiatives: Direct, Foundation, and Collaboration. The author hypothesises that the choice of social cause and ownership types influence the choice of CSR implementation modes. Using a large sample of the 2908 CSR projects implemented in 2014-2018 by the top five hundred Bombay stock exchange publicly listed firms, the author examines the influence of these factors on the CSR implementation modes. This study is being done in two phases, phase 1 is quantitative and phase 2 is qualitative. The results from quantitative phase 1 show that the firms mostly align their CSR efforts on four social causes education, healthcare, environment, and rural. While controlling the firm performance and size, the results from multiple logistics regression analysis indicate that the firms with CSR focus on the education social cause prefer foundation modes of implementation over the other modes. The firms with CSR focus on the healthcare social cause prefer collaboration mode over the other modes. The firms with CSR focus on other social causes, environment and rural do not find any significant relationship with the choice of CSR implementation modes. Furthermore, the results indicate that firms with foreign ownership structures prefer collaboration mode over the other modes. newline