Corporate Social Responsibility Activity Combinations for Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Korean Firms

Jinhwan Kim, Hyeob Kim and HyukJun Kwon
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Jinhwan Kim: Department of Business Administration, Global Business School, Soonchunhyang University, Asan 31538, Korea
Hyeob Kim: Department of Security Convergence, Graduate School, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Korea
HyukJun Kwon: Department of IT-Finance Management, Global Business School, Soonchunhyang University, Asan 31538, Korea

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 24, 1-20

Abstract: We examine how combinations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities yield high performance in Korean companies by addressing two related questions to expand our limited knowledge. First, what combinations of CSR activities yield high performance? Second, how do CSR activities form an interdependent system based on different corporate contexts? We draw the 2012–2018 data from the Korean Economic Justice Institute index for a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results reveal several effective CSR activity factor combinations under the given strategies and management environments. Companies with a high performance exhibit complementarity between social contribution, environmental management, fairness, and employee satisfaction. By contrast, companies with a low corporate performance show no complementarity between relatively unrelated activity factors. For companies with a low financial performance from CSR activities, most of the causal pathways focus only on activities at the primary stakeholder level, with weak diversity of CSR activities’ combinations at the primary and secondary stakeholder levels. These results indicate not only the appropriateness of CSR activity factor combinations for companies’ strategy and management environment contexts, but also their effectiveness, and are expected to provide companies with significant implications for CSR activities.

Keywords: comparative analysis; complementarity; corporate social responsibility; CSR; fsQCA; fuzzy set qualitative; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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