Digital Transformation And Corporate Social Responsibility

In recent years,as the digital economy has become a new driving force for economic growth,the scale of the digital economy has continued to expand,and the global digital transformation has accelerated,becoming an important factor affecting the world economic landscape.Since 2017,China has included the "digital economy" as an important element in the government work report.Meanwhile,in the 14 th Five-Year Plan released in 2020,it was written that "digital transformation as a whole will drive changes in production,lifestyle and governance",formally proposing digital transformation as the development direction,since then,digital transformation has formally become a national-level strategy from the initial core direction of enterprise development.As digital policy has received more and more attention,digital transformation has become an inevitable choice for enterprises to move towards high-quality development.While digital technology brings economic benefits to society and enterprises,a series of social problems such as consumer information leakage have gradually attracted attention.Actively assuming social responsibility and balancing the relationship between various stakeholders have become issues that enterprises need to consider on their way to digital transformation.In this paper,we take China’s listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2010 to 2020 as our research samples,conduct text analysis of the annual reports disclosed by companies,establish a digital lexicon,and further isolate the content related to enterprises’ substantive digital transformation in operations and other aspects,further discriminate and organize the data to obtain substantive digital transformation,and the empirical results find that(1)digital transformation can prompt enterprises to assume social responsibility;(2)enterprises conducting substantial digital transformation can also improve their social responsibility undertaking level;(3)according to the mechanism analysis,it is found that digital transformation and substantial digital transformation can improve enterprises’ social responsibility undertaking level by improving innovation capability,reducing enterprises’ financing constraints,and improving internal control level;(4)in the heterogeneity analysis,digital transformation and substantial The promotion effect of digital transformation on CSR undertaking is more obvious in non-state enterprises,technology-intensive industries,manufacturing industries,and markets with high media attention and low competition;in addition,among the segments of substantive transformation,the level of CSR undertaking is higher among enterprises that conduct digital transformation in the operation segment.The research in this paper not only further enriches the research on social responsibility undertaking in the context of digital economy,but also supplements the research on the influencing factors affecting enterprises’ social responsibility undertaking,and helps enterprises understand the role played by digital transformation in their social responsibility fulfillment process,and also provides some basis for stakeholders’ decision making,which has some policy inspiration significance and is useful for accelerating digital transformation and improving It provides some references for accelerating digital transformation and improving the level of social responsibility undertaking.