The Empirical Study Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Competitiveness

With the economic power of corporate has become stronger, social wealth is increasingly concentrated to the enterprise, people have paid more and more attention to corporates, there are some controversial ideas about the meaning of corporate existence and its purpose. Maximization of shareholders’ interests and the interests of stakeholders has been the topic of debate of academia and the business community.This topic leads to two kinds of view about corporate social responsibility.Some people think that the purpose of corporate is working for the investor.Other people think that corporate exist in the social,lt must have some relations with stakeholders,for exemple customer,provider,government,environment and so on.Only has corporate get along well with all stakeholders,It means that corporate has take responsibility for social.With the intensify competition of market,more and more corporate realize that they can not disregard the issure of consumers,occupational safety,labor disputes and environmental pollution on their own development, while they must go to satisfy the interests and requirements of customers, employees, suppliers, communities, governments and other stakeholders. With the SA8000(the international standards of corporate social responsibility) has been released by the ILO in1997, many international organizations have introduced the index to measure corporate social responsibility,for exemple "Dow Jones Sustainability index"(1999),Australia Reputex index(2003),Social responsibility guidelines of listed companies issued by the Shenzhen securities companies,Environmental information disclosure guidelines of listed companies in Shanghai Stock Exchange issued by Shanghai Stock Exchange.lt means that corporate social responsibility is that the consensus of the business community and the general trend.However,the number of corporate who take responsibility for social is very little,because many companies still believe that taking responsibility for social will increase their costs and reduse their competiveness in the market. So they do not want to take initiative to take responsibility for social.While pursuiting of the maximizing of their interests, ignoring a series of problems of product quality and environmental protection. Therefore, consumers, employees,suppliers,shareholders,government and other stakeholders call for companies taking responsibility for social.And the extent of corporate taking social responsibility has become an important factor to measure of the competitiveness of enterprises.The modern corporates’ practices of social responsibility have proved that the enterprises who achieving a certain standard of social responsibility will get the competitiveness in the market.Foreign companies have also considered social responsibility as a long-trem investment,and seen shouldering social responsibility as an important means to gain competitiveness.Enterprises taking responsibility for social is not only the people’s call,it relates to enterprises’ competitiveness.The first social responsibility report of pharmaceutical industry was published by the Baiyun Mountain Hutchison Whampoa in Guangzhou, the report shew that the economic efficiency of enterprises did not deline when taking responsibility for social,but it received a high-speed growth of30%.In recent years,the food safety incidents of melamine","Clenbuterol","Plasticizing agent" happened because of the the food and beverage companies lacking the sence of social responsibility.Food ang beverage safety issues lead to two results:on one hand,it will threat the people’s life and health;on the other hand,it will cause a bad influence to the entire food and beverage industry.So in face of the frequent occurrence ofsafety issues,people has pay more and more emphasis on corporate social responsibility of food and beverage.Now,there are two views on the relations between corporate social responsibility with corporate competitive power:one view is that corporate taking responsibility for social will increase the operating cost,decrease corporate profit,then it will reduce the competitiveness of enterprises.Other point of view is that corporate taking responsibility for social will improve the relationship between enterprises and stakeholders,it will enchance the corporate image and brand awareness,then it will be good for the competitiveness of enterprises.According,this paper focuses on the following problem:whether corporate social responsibility exerts influence on corporate competitive?positive impact or negative impact?how the extent of the impact?We can get the answer through the empirical analysis of corporate social responsibility and corporate competitive.Focusing on the case of food and beverage companies,this paper delicates to present a comprehensive study of this topic through the analysis of the characteristics of food and beverage companies social responsibility,and combination with the stakeholder theory.It could enrich the research in this field theoretically and instruct enterprises to take social responsibility practically,which is beneficial to the sustainable development of food and beverage companies.The outline and main point of this paper are as follows:1.Give definition to corporate social responsibility and corporate competitive power by drawing on the views of scholars home and abroad.2.Theoretical basis,give a brief presentation of corporate contract theory,corporate citizenship theory,and focuses on the stakeholder theory as the theoretical basis of this paper.Give a brief presentation the theory of corporate competitive power,take Jin Bei’s competitiveness evalution system for reference,set up platform for the latter study.3. Combined food and beverage companies, analyse of the level and content of corporate social responsibility, based on stakeholder theory, qualitative analysis of the impact of food and beverage corporate social responsibility on the competitiveness.4. Empirical study of social responsibility and competitiveness of the food and beverage companies.Based on the theoretical basis of the previous, making hypothesis in this paper, constructing the corresponding econometric model to test the model assumptions through the data processing and analysis of sample companies,take Empirical Analysis of the impact of food and beverage corporate social responsibility on the competitiveness.5.Recapitulates the conclusion and present suggestions.Raise the lack of this paper and outlook.By using the statistics of67food and beverage companies from2009to2010and empirical methods,we find that,corporate will significantly enhance their competitiveness by commiting the responsibility of shareholders,government suppliers and consumers,while commiting the responsibility of creditor and staffs is not relevant to competitiveness.In short time,the more responsibilities the corporate take,the more competitiveness it would be.At the same time, according to the research on the controlled variables,we find that the larger the company size is, the better corporate competitiveness.