Research On The Social Responsibilities Of Resource-based Enterprises From The Perspective Of Stakeholders

Along with the development of economic globalization, the social responsibilities of enterprises attracting increasing concern from all over the world. The arguments about whether enterprises should shoulder these responsibilities have long dropped in the academic field. What become the focuses of the theoretical field are as follows:Should enterprises of different types shoulder same social responsibilities? To whom should enterprises be responsible? What responsibilities should they shoulder?Resources-based enterprises is a special category among all enterprises, whose producing mode is based on the exploitation and preliminary processing of undeniable natural resources, and whose competing priority comes from their possession and monopolization of natural resources. The producing process of them brings serious damages to natural resources because materials and products of them are all natural resources. Obviously, the social responsibilities of this kind of enterprises have some features different from other types:As the important energy enterprises of the country, they shoulder the important responsibility of protecting national energy security; because the natural resources are undeniable, the demands of sustainable development of resources-based enterprises are more imperative; for the disadvantages of frontline employees and the highly dangerous working environment, resources-based enterprises shoulder important responsibility of ensuring the life and health of them; due to the damages to natural resources they made during producing process, resources-based enterprises shoulder responsibilities of protecting and preserving the natural environment. However, nowadays in China, the absence of social responsibilities of this kind of enterprise becomes very serious. Social problems arisen by it, such as devastating accidents in the mine and severe environmental pollution have brought grievous influences to the society. Hence, it is of very important theoretical and practical significances to discuss the main contents of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises in detail combined with the particularities of them, and to construct the evaluating system of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises, which can provide basis for self-evaluation and third-party-evaluation of social responsibilities of enterprises.It becomes a new approach and trend to introduce the stakeholder theory into the research of the social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises. It can make up for the weakness of the enterprise social responsibility theory, and can clarify to whom enterprises are responsible why they are responsible. It has great theoretical and practical significances to study the social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders. The theoretical significances are:enhancing the reorganization of the concept of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises and defining the objects and contents of it; establishing the new approach that study the priority of social responsibilities of enterprises according to stakeholders category; exploring the new aspect of classify stakeholders of resources-based enterprises according to the theory of resource dependency. The practical significances are: establishing the evaluation system of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders, which can effectively solve the lack of theoretical guidance for them; supervising departments can supervise and evaluate the performance of resources-based enterprises according to the evaluation system established by this thesis, and resources-based enterprises can achieve self-evaluation of their social responsibilities by themselves according to it, which is helpful to promote the development of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises.The approach of this research is:analyzing the enterprise social responsibility theory and the stakeholder theory to find their internal relationship, which indicates that the stakeholder theory can define the objects and contents of enterprise social responsibility, and is a new extension of social responsibility theory. Based on literature review, the particularities of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises and status quo of its absences are analyzed, which concludes that current enterprise social responsibility theory can hardly direct its practice, so stakeholder theory should be introduced to research the social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises. In order to define the priority of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises, empirical research on the classification of stakeholders of resources-based enterprises is produced according to the resources dependency theory, which is based on analyzing the limitations of previous classification of stakeholders, and combined with the characteristics of resources-based enterprises. According to the findings of empirical research, the stakeholders of resources-based enterprises are classified into those related to the key interests, those related to the important interests, and those related to the general interests. The priority order of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises is defined by this classification; the evaluating indicator system of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises is established from the perspective of these stakeholders, and the situation of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises is empirically researched according to this indicator system. At last, suggestions of improving the social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises are brought forward.This paper is divided into eight chapters:The first chapter is introduction. It mainly introduces the purpose and significance, the object and method, the approach and main content, and the innovation, etc. of the research.The second chapter is literature review. The related researches of enterprise social responsibility theory and stakeholder theory are reviewed, which concludes that the researches on enterprise social responsibility in current literature have gradually paid more attention on the objects and contents of it, more concerns about the stakeholders, the natural environment, and the rights and interests protection of employees, but still have some shortages:lack of discussions on the particularity of different type of enterprises; lack of considerations on the priority of different stakeholders in enterprise social responsibility; and lack of detailed explorations on how to apply stakeholder theory into enterprise social responsibility.The third chapter is the absence of social responsibility of resource-based enterprises and the analysis of its reasons. The particularity, status quo and problems of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises are analyzed, and the specific reasons of the absence of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises are analyzed from inner and outer aspects, which concludes that:(1) the social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises have its particularity, the performance of it has great significance to the country, the society and the enterprises themselves; (2) the situation of the absences of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises is serious, which brings severe social problems and starves for restriction and regulation; (3) it is lack of systematical researches and corresponding standards on social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises.The fourth chapter is the reorganization and classification of the stakeholders in resource-based enterprises. The stakeholders of resource-based enterprises are defined, whose importance to enterprises will be different according to the importance of the resources they controlled to enterprises, and this kind of difference should be materialized on enterprise social responsibility. Hence, classified researches on stakeholders in resource-based enterprises are needed in order to confirm the priority order of their social responsibilities. According to the characteristics of resource-based enterprises, resource dependency theory is selected as the classification standard to produce empirical research on the classification of stakeholders in resource-based enterprises. The stakeholders of resource-based enterprises are classified into key stakeholders, important stakeholders and general stakeholders in accordance with the results of empirical research.The fifth chapter is the priority and content of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders. Based on the classification of stakeholders mentioned above, the priority of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises is analyzed, and the detailed contents of enterprise social responsibilities to different stakeholders are analyzed.The sixth chapter is the evaluation of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders. The evaluation system of enterprise social responsibilities both home and abroad are introduced and analyzed, which indicates that the current evaluation system of social responsibilities is lack of individual researches for different industries, and lack of considerations on the priority differences of stakeholders. Hence, the evaluation system of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises is established, and the evaluating indicator system of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises is established from three perspectives, namely, the perspectives of responsibilities to key stakeholders, responsibilities to important stakeholders and responsibilities to general stakeholders. Fuzzy colligate evaluation method is applied to study the social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises, and the validity of this evaluation system is empirically analyzed by typical cases. The seventh chapter is the improvement of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders. Countermeasures of improving social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises are proposed from enhancing the external supervising mechanism of resource-based enterprises and improving the co-promotion of stakeholders. The objective mode of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises are also studied and proposed, namely, the mode of key stakeholders'responsibility take priority and the mode of stakeholders'responsibility totally promoting.The eighth chapter is the conclusions and policy suggestions.The main innovation points of this paper lie in:(1) researched the social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises start with stakeholder theory, and defined the conception of social responsibility of resources-based enterprise; (2) proposed the point of view that enterprise social responsibility has priority, and researched the priority of social responsibilities of resources-based enterprises according to the classification of stakeholders; (3) researched the different type of stakeholders in resources-based enterprises based on resources dependency theory, and according to the characteristics of resources-based enterprises; (4) established the evaluation system of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders, which provided basis for the self-evaluation and social supervision of resources-based enterprises. (5) The objective mode of social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises from the perspective of stakeholders are proposed, which providing referencing standards for performing social responsibilities of resource-based enterprises.