The Impact Of Executive Alumni Network On Corporate Social Responsibility

In recent years,the idea of ESG investment has been favored by major investors in the capital market,and the pursuit of sustainable development and long-term value has also become the operation principle of enterprises in the new era.Chinese enterprises are paying more and more attention to the fulfillment of CSR(Corporate social responsibility).And many scholars have carried out studies on the motivation of CSR,mainly including corporate internal governance characteristics and external formal systems such as government policies,legal environment,et.al.Many scholars found that informal institution has played an important role in corporate governance,which is a supplementary means of formal system,.The social network is an informal institution.Referring to the impact of social network on CSR,the existing literature only focus on the interlocking director.But,there are various forms of social relations.This paper discusses the impact of alumni relationship on CSR.As a special social group,the Alumni Association has made its contribution to poverty alleviation,post-disaster reconstruction,epidemic prevention and control and other major social activities in recent years.The Alumni Association has always upheld the concept of "serving alumni and giving back to society" and called on alumni from all walks of life to CSR.As the key link of alumni enterprises,alumni association has built a communication platform for alumni executives to exchange information and share knowledge,which ultimately affects the strategic decisions of enterprises.Based on the above research background,this paper uses samples of A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2020 to explore the impact of characteristics of executive alumni network on CSR,including centrality,structural hole and regional convergence.Based on social network theory,information asymmetry theory,reputation theory and system theory,this paper argues that alumni network location can affect CSR through the following ways.Firstly,the members of the dominant position in the network often have information advantages,the amount and quality of information that executives can grasp often impact their social responsibility decisions.Secondly,the members occupying the central position tend to have a high reputation,they are willing to actively fulfill their social responsibilities in order to maintain the original image.In addition,when the external environment is uncertain,imitation is often the best choice.Therefore,the existence of benchmark enterprises in the alumni network may form a contagion effect and promote the related enterprises to actively fulfill their social responsibilities.Finally,executives in dominant positions usually control more resources and even master the direction of resource flow.They are not easy to gain the trust of marginal alumni and are willing to actively fulfill social responsibilities in order to gain their support.In addition,this paper believes that the connection closeness of alumni network may affect the relationship between alumni network and CSR,so the regional characteristics of the network are taken into account to continue to discuss the impact of alumni network regional convergence on CSR.In this paper,the research results show that the centrality,structural hole richness and geographical convergence of alumni network are positively promote the fulfillment of CSR.This paper also carry out he robustness test by substituting variables and lagging one stage,and solves the endogenous problem through the Heckman two-stage and instrumental variable.The empirical results show that the conclusions of this paper are relatively reliable.In the further analysis,this paper carries out grouping regression according to property right nature,social responsibility of different dimensions and regional development level,and uses the seemingly unrelated model to test the coefficient difference between groups.The results show that the alumni network has a stronger promoting effect on CSR in state-owned enterprises.And compared with other responsibilities of indirect stakeholders,alumni network has a more obvious positive effect on economic responsibilities of direct stakeholders.Moreover,in the regions with high level of regional development,alumni network plays a stronger role in promoting CSR.A large number of previous literature about the motivation of CSR mainly payed attention to internal characteristics and external environment of corporate governance,and less discussed the external social relations,and merely some scholars studied the mechanism of interlocking director on CSR.This paper focuses on the perspective of executive alumni relationship and studies the impact of executive personal social capital on CSR.This paper theoretically enrich the research results related to corporate social network and CSR,at the same time,provides a reference approach about how to promote the level of CSR under the new era.Rely on the platform in universities,the concept of "leading the responsibility education" can been incorporated into university education,then it can influence social responsibility cognition of alumni executives from the perspective of values,and further,promote the investment of CSR.In addition,it can also use the leading power of alumni associations,alumni foundations,alumni entrepreneur clubs and other associations to call on alumni executives from all walks of life to contribute their power and ideas to CSR.It is of great practical significance to gather the strength of alumni enterprises and inject new vitality into the promotion of social welfare undertakings.