What Motivates Stakeholders to Demand Corporate Social Responsibility: A Survey Experiment

Tomomi Yamane and Shinji Kaneko
Additional contact information
Tomomi Yamane: Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS), Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8530, Japan
Shinji Kaneko: Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS), Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8530, Japan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 15, 1-15

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.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility; other-regarding behavior; sustainable development; conjoint survey experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8313/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8313/ (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:13:y:2021:i:15:p:8313-:d:601418

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 ().