A Study On Corporate Social Responsibility Driving Mechanism

In recent years, Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been explicitly included in almost all of the western large corporations' agenda and corporate governance is moving away from total quality management, environment management to corporate social responsibility management. CSR has become a new resource to enhance enterprise competence. Though Chinese enterprises' CSR consciousness is improving recently, the overall situation is still worrying. It not only influences our country's economy and society sustainable development but the realization of harmonious society. The urgency of practical requirement demands us to concentrate on Chinese enterprises' insufficient CSR motivation. Most of the existing studies analyze CSR from the perspective of society rather than corporate own driving mechanism and then we decide to choose Chinese CSR driving mechanism as the subject of the study.Firstly, the paper gives detailed information on CSR literature, such as CSR's idea origin, historical background, theoretical debate evolution, various definitions and domestic and foreign research development trends. Then the related theories such as three dimension model, exchange theory and game theory are introduced and the theoretical framework of the paper for further research is formed.Secondly the paper identifies and examines CSR's internal and external driving factors with the data from the 4th China International SMEs fair. The result shows that manager's economic motive, moral motive and multinational buyer presssure are correlated positively with CSR, but employee, community, NGO, customer, market competition, legal environment, government intervention are not. In other words, except multinational buyers, society and government are not CSR's external drivers.Thirdly, according to above findings, the paper apply game theory based on the three dimension structure model of enterprise, society and government to analyze CSR driving mechanisms of china in macro level and try to seek the cause of Chinese enterprises' external CSR driving mechanism absence. Three part game of Chinese enterprises, society and government shows that the absence of mature civil society and subsequent absence of the interest body or public representative in the CSR game and Chinese local governments's and enterprises' interests convergence, ultimate result inevitably is that local governments collude with enterprises and CSR is given up as the "cost" of economy development rationally. Chinese enterprises' CSR driving mechanism comes from the multinational enterprises' production global expansion and CSR's reverse transfer from the western mature citizen society. This mechanism can't resolve the problems of Chinese enterprises' CSR.Fourthly, the paper examines the effectiveness of Chinese internal profit driving mechanism using questionnaire survey of small and medium enterprises from the 4th China international small and medium enterprises fair. The result shows that, as a whole, Chinese enterprises CSR level is consistent with their performance, but differs with regions, firm sizes and industries. Eastern region's effectiveness is higher than the central and the western and the situations of firm sizes and industries are more complicated.Finally, we draw conclusions as followings: (1) Chinese enterprises external driving mechanism lies on the Chinese citizen society's development and growth; (2) Chinese enterprises should incorporate CSR into their long-term strategy and take into account the matchment between the CSR and itself resource, location and industry to achieve profit maximization; (3) Profit pursuit is significant driver of CSR; (4) Mangers' moral levels and values are important driving factors of CSR; (5) Transforming government functions, cultivating CSR awareness of all members of society are important ways to form a good external CSR environment; (6) Encourage enterprises to participate in export and international competition, which is important way to enhance the level of CSR.