A contribution to society may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition in the eyes of the public. It may also reflect a better mutual understanding of the meaning of CSR between the company as the giver and the public as the recipient of CSR benefits. It has been promoted by various organizations, eg, the Stock Exchange of Thailand which has promoted CSR in listed companies as an enhanced version of corporate governance.
This is one of the mechanisms that helps to promote the concept of CSR more widely. CSR is interpreted as a de facto industry standard in the new era (Prachachart Turakij, 2005). Thus, CSR is widespread to the extent that the public possessed a sufficient understanding of the concept to form its own view of corporate responsibility to society.
The next section will elaborate literature on the definition of CSR and how it has been developed to date as well as the importance of the public as general stakeholders. Early literature in the 1950s emphasized the role of business in society, focusing on ethical dimensions. This version of CSR is a compromise between corporate responsibility as altruistic behavior towards other members of society and corporate responsibility only to pursue economic goals.
When CSR is considered discretionary, most CSR studies are based on company or manager perspectives.
Respondentsû Demographics
In selective coding, the author grouped thirty-five keywords from the initial coding into ten groups and gave new titles representing the main idea of each group. Basically, keywords that occur frequently were listed and the frequency of each word was counted. Characteristics of socially responsible and irresponsible companies were compared and confirmed by criteria regarding highly socially responsible companies.
Respondents who are civil servants, private companies and students made up just over seventy percent.
Key Findings and Analysis
The party to whom a company should be responsible
Characteristics of socially responsible companies
State or impact on society), care for the environment, corrective measures for the consequences of the company's actions, contributions to society/creating a better society, ethics/codes of conduct/good governance. Note: This question asked respondents to indicate the characteristics of a company that is socially responsible in terms of operations. However, since an open-ended questionnaire was used, respondents understood the words 'characteristics' as 'being' in addition to 'functioning'. Thus, a large number of respondents emphasized that they are companies that are well established and have high liquidity. and high profit should do social contribution activities.
Interestingly, thirteen percent of respondents indicated that established, large companies with high profits and liquidity should be active in CSR activities. In addition, companies in sectors with potential negative impacts on the environment and social order, such as alcohol distribution – a sector associated with high rates of car accidents – need to take CSR action. Among the ten characteristics of corporate social responsibility, there were two sets of descriptors – doing and being – that were described as reflecting social responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit.
The entities that answered who are responsible indicated companies with high profits and liquidity and companies that bring negative consequences to society and the environment. The public takes it for granted that these two types of companies must carry out social responsibility programs.
Characteristics of socially irresponsible companies
After selective coding, the frequencies of each selective code were calculated and shown in Table 4. Social contributions were ranked first followed by profit philosophy, which is profit optimization rather than profit maximization. These are shown in Table 5 and the frequency of each selective code is shown in Table 6.
Lack of accountability for company operations (eg fraud, exploitation and unethical), especially in marketing programs, was a critical component in the Thai market. Negligence was the key word that proved the company's social irresponsibility (i.e. negligence towards the suffering of members of society, the negative effects of the company's operation and the welfare of employees).
Socially responsible versus irresponsible company characteristics
CSR and irresponsible corporate characteristics were combined regardless of frequency, and a CSR continuum was constructed as shown in Table 8. The first three items were CSR characteristics, and the last three items were. The remaining seven elements occupy the gray zone, where success in doing so was seen as socially responsible and failure as socially irresponsible.
Action to preserve environment/reduce environmental destruction/restore the destroyed environment/replacement planting/enlargement of forestry area. No fraud, no profiteering, work ethically and adhere to the code of conduct with good governance. Don't overemphasize profit maximization / have a good balance in managing profit earned (for social benefit).
Do not avoid action by using tricks Failure to care for the employee (eg fire employees without warning, inadequate safety measures, etc.).
Descriptors of highly socially responsible companies
Summary and discussion
Many pointed to the inability to properly conduct companies' value chain activities, such as inappropriate pricing, developing or offering a product that could have a negative impact on society (e.g. liquor), and excessive advertising was socially irresponsible indicators. In conclusion, the public considers business activities to be CSR if they are conducted honestly and in a continuous manner with concrete results that affect a wide range of stakeholders in society. Companies that did not develop explicit CSR activities, but did comply with the law and code of conduct, were not regarded as socially irresponsible.
In other words, companies that do no harm could be considered socially responsible. This finding is consistent with the CSR continuum proposed by Pedersen (2010) where one pole represents activities that cause no harm while the other pole represents activities that express positive power. Although the term corporate social responsibility is used, the public has seen the word responsibility as two other words, liability and contribution.
The large, highly stable and liquidated company should contribute to society, but only in a continuous and consistent way to be labeled as socially responsible. Contributing to society may be a necessary condition, but it was not enough for the company to be socially responsible in the eyes of the Thai public. The point to think about here is the weakness of the rule of law, the check-and-balance system, and the protection of worker and consumer welfare.
While corporate social responsibility is interpreted as a good deed; the question is how well the corporation is doing. However, giving to the poor or neglected on the one hand and exploiting employees or consumers on the other cannot be characterized as socially responsible behavior. In addition, descriptors such as çcontinuous manneré, çsincereé and çconcrete results derived from respondents' answers reflect a low level of public trust in corporate social responsibility in general.
It takes some time to see and conclude that these companies are doing well in the interest of the general public and not for themselves. So corporate responsibility is not just a business ethic that leaves it to company executives to think about what they want to give back to society. It is the duty of the companies to be accountable enough to gain legitimacy to operate in the society.
Implications and limitations
Businesses that may have negative impacts on the environment and social order are expected to show corrective actions through CSR. Multinational enterprises looking for new sources of input, especially for natural resources, should consider this issue. Although this study was designed to understand how the Thai public views corporations regarding the issue of their social responsibility, both local and multinational companies, both large and smaller corporations can benefit from the findings.
The CSR continuum derived from this study is the necessity to adjust the CSR assessment element to match with the expectations of the public to reveal the real responsibility that a company should bear. As context matters, it is premature to adopt a specific standard to assess a company's CSR performance (Olsen, 2012). When quantifying qualitative data on a large scale, some in-depth data had to be ignored for simplicity of presentation.
A characteristic of the company, such as indifference to the suffering of society members, may be worth testing in further empirical, comparative studies using individualistic cultures as case studies.
Conclusion
Starting grand projects based on a specific issue that is treated as a social problem is good, but taking care of direct stakeholders like employees and customers is good. Being a responsible corporation in this sense, the company is creating a better society for all. CSR will no longer be treated simply as an ethical business issue, but is a rational action that every company should take.
The role of MNEs in community development initiatives in developing countries - Corporate social responsibility at work in Nigeria and South Africa. At Least Do No Harm: Resources on the Changing Role of Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility.
In Thai
Earth Summit: UN Conference on Environment and Development official URL: http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html, accessed 29 February 2009. Towards an internal change management perspective of CSR: Evidence from the RESPONSE project on sources to cognitive fit between managers and their stakeholders, and their implications for social performance.
