An Empirical Study Of The Cognitive Level And Behavior Of Our Corporate Social Responsibility

The primary idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) firstly came out in the west in the 19th century. And the concrete explanation for the connotation of this concept was formally put forward by American scholars at the beginning of the 20th century. After many years of constant debate and deep discussion, the consensus regarding this concept had finally formed: the corporation's own development and perfection is the prerequisite of its fulfillment of social responsibilities, that is to say, the basic social responsibilities of the corporation is its economic responsibilities to the shareholders. Since 1990s, the multinational corporations and international organizations' promotion of CSR has lead to the attentions to this idea from various circles in China. However, compared to the research achievements and practice concerning CSR in other countries, both the theoretical development and practical activities are still in the preliminary stage of exploration in China. The purpose of this paper is to deduce from the perspective of the business managers and employees the cognition of CSR's connotation as well as its dimensions which meet the realistic situation of corporations in China. Also, this paper studied the impact of the cognitive level on the corporation's fulfillment of its social responsibilities.This paper concentrated on the cognition and fulfillment activities of corporate social responsibilities in today's China, and put forward four relevant questions, which would be either answered in the paper or left to be studied in the future. Guided by these questions, the CSR's concept and content, as well as related achievements of theoretical research conducted home and abroad, were summarized. Based on the above stated theories, this paper proposed the assumptions concerning the cognitive levels and behavioral performance of CRS: individual characteristics of the corporate employee have impact on his or her cognitive level; the characteristic of a corporation has impact on its behavioral performances of the social responsibilities; and at the same time the sum of the cognitive level of all employees has positive impact on the activities of the corporation's fulfillment of its social responsibilities. In the empirical part, the theories concerning dimensions of social responsibility and stakeholders were combined together to deduce the indicators for the empirical measurement and a questionnaire system organized into three sections. The questionnaire system was applied to conduct a survey with a sample of some corporations in Shaanxi Province. Then the factorial analysis method was used to analyze the measurement results of the cognitive level and behavioral performance of CSR from the questionnaire, which resulted in new dimensions. These new dimensions were considered as variables for further analysis of variance, correlation analysis and regression analysis by using SPSS16.0 in order to verify the proposed assumptions. Finally, the following conclusions were made:the impact of individual characteristics on CSR cognitive level is not significant; the nature of corporate ownership and the size of the corporation are the characteristics of a corporation which have significant impact on its the behavioral performance of CSR; CSR cognitive level of a corporation has a significant positive impact on its behavioral performance. In the final part, the results of empirical analysis was also discussed and analyzed, and then proposes some policy recommendations to improve the CSR cognitive level and behavior performance.