Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility And Customer Support

Since the last century, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has attracted the attention of several disciplines including economics, management, laws, sociality and philosophy. With the globalization of economy and the stronger social concepts of "focusing on human", the international community's appeal for Corporate Social Responsibility into practices is increasingly becoming a universal trend, and it is arising the attention of aspects of the society. However, there continues to be significant misunderstanding on the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility among both the academic and among business circles. Therefore, it is a valuable effort to carry out the research on Corporate Social Responsibility in order to contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of the concept.Stakeholders constitute the external pressure groups that drive corporate social responsibility behavior of firms. Among, consumers constitute one of the most important groups. Their feedback on corporate social responsibility determines the firm's market efficiency, and consequently will have a major influence on the financial performance of the firm. This research conducts an in-depth and systematic study on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and consumers support.The dissertation is divided into seven chapters as follows:The first Chapter is the Introduction which provides the basic overview of the study, and the theoretical and practical background of the study on which the research problem is based. The first Chapter also outlines the structure of the dissertation, provides the conceptual framework, introduces the research methodology and states the study's contribution to knowledge.The second chapter reviews the relevant literature. This chapter systematically reviews the basic concepts introduced in the preceding the chapter, including researches related to Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Support, the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and customer support, and a brief introduction on measurement of Corporate Reputation. The main objective of this chapter is to survey the historical evolution of theoretical perspectives, obtaining the understanding of the current theory, practices and frontier dynamics in the field. Based on the understanding of the relationships between various concepts from the literature, a theoretical framework of the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Customer Support is build.The third Chapter focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of the study. This includes Stakeholder Theory, Organization Identity Theory and Theory Cue Utilization Theory. The hypothesis and the model assumption of the following section of the study are based on the theoretical foundation in this chapter.The fourth chapter is the builds the theoretical model on the influence on Corporate Social Responsibility on Customer Support. This chapter further discuses how Corporate Social Responsibility behavior affect customer support and analyzes how Corporate Social Responsibility behavior affect Customer Support, and how Corporate Reputation and Customer-Corporate Identification intermediate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Customer Support. Finally the study proposes a set of hypotheses to be tested by the study.The fifth Chapter is the research design. This chapter introduces the design of Questionnaire, the definition and measurement of variables, the data collection procedure, and data processing procedure.The sixth Chapter describes the empirical study. First, the Chapter provides the descriptive statistics on sample, and then the data quality checks. Finally data analysis is conducted and the empirical results reported, including model fitting results, hypothesis testing and analysis of the mediating effect.The seventh Chapter provides main conclusions of the study and recommendations for further research. This also provides the key implications of the study findings to management practice and the main theoretical contribution of the study. The chapter also addresses the limitations of the study and provides recommendation for the further research.This study has summarized theoretical researches related to the topic. Following the trend of theoretical development, Corporate Social Responsibility was chosen as a trendy area of study analysis. Based on previous research, the study conducted a much deeper analysis use of stakeholder theory, organizational identification theory and cue utilization theory on the study relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Consumer. This study contributes to knowledge in several ways:The first contribution is on the research methodology used. The study clearly articulated the path of corporate social responsibility on consumer support and tested the theoretical model through the market survey on consumer electronics products.Secondly, the study has also deepened the content and awareness of the concept of corporate social responsibility, and taken an empirical test to the levels of Corporate Social Responsibility in the perspective of developing countries customers. The related definitions of the concept have been endless since the concept was given by Bowen. This study defined Corporate Social Responsibility from the perspective of Environmental protection and society contribution in the perspective of developing countries consumer and investigated the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and consumers supports using empirical methods.Thirdly, the study result specifically pointed out the affect path of Corporate Social Responsibility on Consumer Support through Corporate and Consumer-corporate Identification and articulated the relationship between different dimensions of Corporate Social Responsibility and Consumer Support. It has also deeply analyzed the relationship among the internal factors involved in latent variables and the Mediating effect of involved variables.