Measurement of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review of Corporate Sustainability Indexes, Rankings and Ratings

Borja Diez-Cañamero, Tania Bishara, Jose Ramon Otegi-Olaso, Rikardo Minguez and José María Fernández
Additional contact information
Borja Diez-Cañamero: Department of Graphic Design and Engineering Projects, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48013 Bilbao, Spain
Tania Bishara: Department of Graphic Design and Engineering Projects, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48013 Bilbao, Spain
Jose Ramon Otegi-Olaso: Department of Graphic Design and Engineering Projects, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48013 Bilbao, Spain
Rikardo Minguez: Department of Graphic Design and Engineering Projects, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48013 Bilbao, Spain
José María Fernández: IHOBE, Basque Government, 48011 Bilbao, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 5, 1-36

Abstract: Companies are currently changing their traditional role in society and transforming it into a proactive role in which their operations generate social and environmental positive impacts. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved from simple philanthropy to a more theoretical concept with a new corporate philosophy that takes all the interests of all stakeholders into consideration. The financial market is pushing the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI), which has led to the rise of Corporate Sustainability Systems (CSS). These CSSs are tools that rate corporate performance on sustainability. However, they constitute a chaotic universe, with instruments of different nature. This paper identifies and groups the common characteristics of the CSSs into three different typologies: Indexes, Rankings and Ratings. Despite this classification, and although the fundamental pillar of CSR is the “Stakeholder Theory”, CSSs are still not ideal tools to be used by all stakeholders. From the magma of CSSs, this article identifies and describes, through a comparative analysis, those which best comply with the “Stakeholder Theory”. This paper facilitates the work of researchers and stakeholders by exposing the differential characteristics of the most important CSSs.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); Socially Responsible Investment (SRI); Environment, Social and Governance Criterion (ESG); Stakeholder Theory; sustainability Indexes; sustainability Rankings; sustainability Ratings; ESG performance; sustainability performance; corporate sustainable system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/2153/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/2153/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:5:p:2153-:d:330920

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().