Corporate Social Responsibility In China

Nowadays, corporate social responsibility has become a crucial topic worldwide, which the enterprisers need to concern about in enterprise operation and management. Enterprisers in China are attaching importance to undertake the social responsibility gradually. Particularly, the overwhelming majority of domestic enterprises are full of enthusiasm about charitable donation. Meanwhile, some irregular behaviors, which are against corporate social responsibility, are often observed, even in some famous enterprises. This phenomenon leads to the following questions:How are Chinese firms doing corporate social responsibility? More specifically, first, whether the enterprises undertake other more essential parts of corporate social responsibility, while donating generously? Second, beneath the charitable donation, are there other motivations which are irrelative with social responsibility? Then, whether plenty of FDI entries will influent the performance of Chinese corporate social responsibility, as globalization continues apace and the policy of reformation and opening goes deep? And if the influence exists, what is the concrete mechanism of it? Furthermore, since we suspect that there are distortions in some aspects of domestic corporate social responsibility, these distortions can cause developed countries to regulate Chinese enterprises in CSR more easily. In this sense, improving the ability of Chinese firms to undertake corporate social responsibility is considerably pivotal. Then, which kind of system should we establish to reverse the undesirable situation and to cope with the global tendency of corporate social responsibility?The dissertation consists of six chapters discussing the above questions:Chapter one consists of three parts.Firstly, we introduce the present background of domestic corporate social responsibility and give the meaning of this study. Furthermore, we define the key concepts involved in this study and make arrangements of the structure and contents of the article. Last but not least, we summarize the research methods and elaborate the contributions.Chapter two is the basis of this article. After reviewing and commenting the literatures, we give answers to the following questions:Whether the enterprises need to undertake corporate social responsibility? What is the definition of corporate social responsibility? How do the firms undertake the social responsibility? Subsequently, we develop two mechanisms, economic motivation and stakeholder pressure, which can explain why enterprises are willing to undertake social responsibility. Finally, we discuss other factors affecting CSR in different perspectives:characteristics of the firms and the directors and social environment.Chapter three gives an empirical test about the fundamental motivation of domestic CSR, according to the research data of 3837 private enterprises in China 2006. In current literature on Chinese CSR, the only focus is charitable donation, while, in this paper, we pay more attention on the essential parts of corporate social responsibility-the enterprises’ performance of labor protection and social security. This chapter examines multi-dimensional corporate social responsibility performance of private firms in China focusing on the role of entrepreneur’s political participation. We found that entrepreneur’s political participation results in more charitable donation while has no impact on more fundamental aspects including workplace safety and workers’social protection. The entrepreneur’s desire to enter politics have significantly positive impact on charitable donation, however such kind of effect diminishes or disappear when it’s fulfilled. Similarly, entrepreneur’s desire to enter politics has no impact concerning workplace safety or workers’ social protection. The results illuminate that Chinese enterprises, especially private enterprises, have the motivation to achieve political resources beneath charitable donations. This can give us complete information on Chinese corporate social responsibility.Chapter four examines the influences FDI enterprises have on domestic suppliers under globalization, based on data of 1268 Chinese enterprises covering 12 cities. We find that FDI enterprises improve the performance of Chinese corporate social responsibility by means of supply chain pressure. As we know, the pressure is heterogeneous:the improvement of Chinese suppliers and clients are different. In other words, FDI entry improves the CSR of their Chinese suppliers significantly, instead of their clients. Moreover, after considering the possible selection biases, we perform propensity score matching, a non-experimental method of sampling, to relieve the impact of selection bias. At last, we investigate the heterogeneities derived from different types of the FDI enterprises and domestic suppliers. We discover that the improvements are greater, when the FDI enterprises are bigger and more important, and if the domestic suppliers are in severer competition, they will perform much better in corporate social responsibility.Chapter five examines union effects for both regular and dispatched workers, based on the survey of workers in Shanghai Volkswagen and General Motors. Labor dispatch is a unique relationship, which gives us a rare research perspective to investigate the independent function of union. In this chapter, we test the heterogeneous effects which the unions have on dispatched workers and regular workers. We find that joining union significantly improves dispatched workers’ condition especially for their monthly benefits, while this result does not hold for regular workers. We argue that this is resulted from the independence of the union of dispatched workers. We also find that union significantly reduces regular workers’ willingness to choose intense ways (such as demonstrations, strikes or petition) to protect their interests, which is not found for the dispatched workers. This implies that the union for dispatched workers is more likely for the interests of workers rather than helping the government or firm to maintain social stability. The conclusion illustrates that an independent union conduce to corporate social responsibility.Chapter seven makes a conclusion of this dissertation, gives some suggestions, and points out further research points.Based on existing literatures, this dissertation studies the motivations of Chinese corporate social responsibility, and answers some significant questions through empirical testing. Its contributions are mainly reflected in the following aspects:Firstly, this dissertation identifies the non-CSR motivation of enterprises’charitable donation in China with a proper perspective, and compares multi-dimensional activities of Chinese corporate social responsibility. The potential problem is that the different dimensions of responsibility are incomparable. In this paper, we study whether the enterprisers’ political identities have same influences on different aspects of corporate social responsibility, focusing on the role of enterprisers’political participation. And another work is that we isolate the possible mechanism by which the political identity impacts the charitable donation.Secondly, one of the difficulties is how to distinguish the mechanism, when it concerns for FDI enterprises’influence on Chinese corporate social responsibility. Different with literatures, this dissertation takes global supply chain into consideration, and analyses how FDI enterprises impact Chinese CSR performance through supply chain pressure. Furthermore, we investigate whether the heterogeneous pressure can affect Chinese CSR performance differently, according to the positions on supply chains. Meanwhile, we use propensity score matching, a frontier empirical method, to avoid the potential selection biases.Thirdly, in developed countries, unions are always able to strive for benefits and rights of workers as associational power of workers. While in China, this is considerably not going to happen. Then, what are the essential differences between Chinese unions and Western countries’unions? And what measures should be taken to make domestic unions work? Labor dispatch is a unique relationship, which gives us a rare research perspective to investigate the independent function of union. We study the heterogeneous impacts of the unions of dispatched workers and the unions of regular workers in the same firm. And that gives an empirical evidence for the function of independent unions, in the present circumstances of China. Additionally, unlike any previous literature, we apply micro-data based on the individual workers in one firm, which can avoid defects of data on enterprise level.