The Research On The Relationship Among Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Capital And Firm Performance

After30years rapid development, China has achieved remarkable success. However, the single enterprise-oriented and short-term profit goals brought a series of social problems. These problems once again made corporate social responsibility (CSR) become a focus that various circles of the society pay close attention to.Whether a business should behave in a social responsible way or not, different people had different kind of view. Bitter arguments ensued from this question. In response to the arguments, from the relationship between CSR and firm performance, researchers has made a lot of empirical study and they attempted to use these empirical data to support their claims, but they did not get a unified conclusion. This made the study of the relationship between CSR and firm performance into trouble. A large number of empirical studies confirmed that corporate social capital(CSC) can increase productivity, reduce transaction costs and promote enterprise and regional economic development through their own network of relationships and the mutual trust, cooperation and commitment spirit between corporate and stakeholders. The relationship between corporate social responsibility and firm performance has not been set, the positive link between social capital and corporate performance is almost certain. So is there some connection between CSR and CSC? If we can solve this problem, we might provide some new ideas for the relationship between CSR and firm performance.From the CSC angle of view, the dissertation attempts to break the one-dimensional thinking way and explore the relationship between CSR and firm performance, finally find out the internal dynamic mechanism for a corporate social responsibility in order to provide some theoretic and practical guidance for the Chinese enterprises.Firstly, the paper reviews the theories and empirical researches about CSR and CSC in the recent years. We find that most scholars study CSR and CSC in two separate way, and the systematic analysis of the intrinsic link between CSR and CSC and they how to raise efficiency and enhance enterprises competitiveness is still rare.Secondly, on the basis of theoretical analysis, this dissertation brings forward four hypotheses of empirical research.Finally, in order to verify the correctness of the theoretical assumptions, this paper uses the data from the annual report of listed112real estate companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange to do the factor analysis, correlation analysis and multi-factors regression analysis.The result is as below:there is no direct relationship between CSR and firm performance, but by the accumulation of social capital we can establish their indirect relationship. Especially, the horizontal dimension and the social trust dimension of CSC have played a positive role to improve the relationship between CSR and firm performance.