CSR Report
The report I am working on is reaching its final stages (with some help from me). I decided that now would be optimal time to examine what an official report actually looks like. Thankfully, my university has a vast archive of private research that it seems to conduct each year. Hopefully, this will be beneficial for all of us.
Today, we will be examining CSR-Sustainability Monitor 2016 Edition, which was created thanks to the effort and contributions made Professor S. Prakash Sethi and his colleagues from the Weissman Center for International Business. The authors are among the many researchers concerned that, despite the growth in CSR reporting, there is an increasing lack of standardization and of a unified regulatory and supervisory landscape. As a result, it is hard for stakeholders to analyze these reports and compare companies based on the information provided. By analyzing 629 valid CSR reports (out of 743) from 43 different HQ locations and 20 industries, the authors came to several conclusions: Higher-tier companies tend consider credibility an integral part of their CSR reports, and that there is a substantial variation in the different styles employed during publication.
Only by rereading the report several times can one truly appreciate the massive amount of effort needed to create such a piece of work. Sadly, for now, I consider this “opus” to be merely a blend of “interesting” and “tedious”. Naturally, companies with a greater amount of capital would try to focus on providing extra evidence to support their claims about their actions- they have more to lose. Furthermore, I believe that that CSR reports should not be a deciding factor for investors- “illogical” acts of charity are never easy to classify, and the focus should instead be on how well a particular company actually operates. Over the past several weeks, we have examined several cases where CSR could help attract new customers, or reduce court penalties- however, so far, we (or I) have failed to discover any precise relationship between the amount of charity work done, and the results it brings. Hopefully, in the future, some new information might come to light.
Sethi, S. Prakash; Martell, Terrence F.; Demir, Mert; Skou, Lene; and Weissman Center for International Business, “CSR-Sustainability Monitor 2016 Edition” (2017).CUNY Academic Works.