Study On The Corporate Social Responsibility Cognition, Practice And Performance Of SMEs In China

As the development of China’s economics and society, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become the focus and hot issue of the theory and the practice. Especially in today’s society, a deeper and fundamental challenge which many enterprises are facing is the overall lack of business ethics and social responsibility. More and more companies are required to pay attention to corporate social responsibility. According to the scholars’research, CSR awareness of SME managers has an important impact on the corporate social practices, and CSR practices and corporate performance have close relation. However, the study of the driving factors of CSR is still relatively less. Therefore, this paper considers the driving force and the cognition of CSR as antecedents to study its impact on the corporate social practice. Meanwhile, we are also trying to find out the impact of corporate social practices on the enterprises’economic, social and environmental performance. Through empirical analysis, we hope to explore the relationship among them, and to provide a practical pattern for the better implementation of CSR.Firstly we reviewed the connotation and related theory of CSR, and then introduced CSR cognition, CSR driving factors, social responsibility practices and corporate performance respectively. A clear logical relationship among them has combed as the theoretical basis for the later assumption. Secondly, based on the theoretical models and assumptions, we designed the measuring index and questionnaire with the combination of stakeholder theory and attribution theory. We conducted the survey in SMEs in Jiangsu, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Chengdou and Zhuj i etc. Then, we started reliability analysis, validity analysis and factor analysis with SPSS17.0statistical software and structural equation analysis with Smart PLS software based on97questionnaires collected as empirical research samples. We concluded as follows:CSR cognition of SME managers has a significant effect on the practice of corporate social responsibility; CSR driving factors don’t significantly affect the practice of social responsibility; CSR practice has a significant influence on economic, social and environmental performance. Finally, we analyzed and discussed the empirical results and put forward policy recommendations to improve our CSR cognition and behaviors. We also summarized the research limitations and feasible directions for future research.