The Impact of Financial Crisis on Corporate Social Responsibility and Its Implications for Reputation Risk Management
The Impact of Financial Crisis on Corporate Social Responsibility and Its Implications for Reputation Risk Management
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金融危机对企业社会责任的影响及其对声誉风险管理的启示
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发表时间：
2012
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Christine Jacob
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作者：
Christine Jacob
本文探讨了2008年金融危机对企业社会责任倡议（CSR）的影响及其对声誉风险管理的影响。社会风险理论认为，有一种新的风险与企业社会责任有关，可以影响公司的声誉价值。本研究是一个多案例研究，考虑了在同一行业经营的两家跨国公司。定性数据已通过多种方式收集，如文件分析，半结构化访谈和在三个不同国家的几个地点进行的规模调查，包括可靠的可持续发展管理顾问的专家意见。调查结果显示，2008年的金融危机对许多公司的企业社会责任计划产生了明显的影响，因为他们为了生存而不得不面对的特殊压力，以及大规模裁员和削减社区参与计划的支出是危机最明显的结果。然而，并非所有影响都被视为负面影响，许多企业社会责任问题在危机后得到了推进和深化，如组织治理和环境政策以及补偿政策。受危机影响的主要利益攸关方是雇员，其次是投资者和客户。同样，在企业社会责任问题上，受影响最严重的是劳工做法。有趣的是，在被研究的公司中，人们认为这些问题对公司的声誉没有最大的影响。公司更加重视与他们认为最有影响力的利益攸关方有关的问题。因此，如果绿色投资者决定撤出，环境政策等问题就会形成社会风险。然而，由于劳动力市场状况恶化，员工在危机期间不被视为有影响力，因此劳动实践的下降不会被视为对声誉价值的威胁。声誉风险管理的影响，可以确定所研究的公司内的风险因素。影响声誉的社会风险有时在年度报告中明确报告，并直接提及环境和人权问题以及供应链管理和与合规和商业行为守则有关的风险。在其他情况下，报告不太明确，这些要素存在于风险管理的内部文件中，但不在已发布的报告中。这意味着许多公司对社会风险的重要性及其对声誉的影响有更好的理解，但他们不一定公开报告。
This paper explores the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives – CSR –and its implications for reputational risk management. The social risk theory suggests that there is a new kind of risk related to CSR that can affect a company’s reputational value. This research is a multiple case study that considers two multinationals operating in the same sector. Qualitative data have been collected in many ways such as document analysis, semi-structured interviews and a scaling survey in several locations in three different countries including expert views from reliable sustainability management consultants. Findings show that the financial crisis of 2008 had a clear impact on CSR initiatives in many companies because of the exceptional pressure that they had to face in order to survive and with massive layoffs and expenditure cuts on community involvement programs being the most obvious outcomes of the crisis. However, not all impacts were seen as negative, many CSR issues were pushed forward and gained more depth after the crisis, such as organizational governance and environmental policies, as well as compensation policies. The main stakeholders that were affected by the crisis were employees; followed by investors and customers. Similarly, in relation to CSR issues, it was labor practices that were the most severely impacted. What is interesting to observe was that in the studied companies, there was a belief that these issues were not considered as having the highest impact on their companies’ reputations. Companies gave more importance to the issues that related to the stakeholders that they perceive to be the most influential. Therefore, an issue such as environmental policies forms a social risk if green investors decide to withdraw. However, employees are not perceived as influential at the time of the crisis because of the deterioration in labor market conditions and hence the drop in labor practices is not perceived as a threat to reputational value. Implications for reputation risk management can be identified by risk considerations within the studied companies. Social risks impacting reputation are sometimes reported explicitly in annual reports with direct reference to environmental and human rights issues as well as supply chain management and risks related to compliance and code of business conduct. The reporting is less explicit in other cases with these elements present in the internal documents for risk management but not in the published reports. This implies that many companies have a better understanding of the importance of social risks and their impact on reputation but they do not necessarily report it openly.