Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Life Cycle And Performance

In September2006, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange released the first "Corporate SocialResponsibility guidelines which respond to their interests in a listed company stakeholders,ecological environment, overall social development responsibility and encourage listed companies toestablish social responsibility disclosure system. In2007, Shanghai Banking Regulatory Bureauissued the " Corporate social responsibility guidelines for Shanghai Banking financial institutions",followed by, State Banking Regulatory Commission, and other provinces’ releasing a series ofrelevant laws and regulations. The end of2008, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange explicit requirementsunder the "Shenzhen100Index listed company" to disclose social responsibility report in accordancewith the provisions of the guidelines. Western exotic concept of "corporate social responsibility" inChina is gradually accepted and into the standardization development. With repeated outbreaks inrecent years, food safety events, corporate pollution emissions, sweatshops, the society calls forcorporate social responsibility.At the same time, academic research on corporate social responsibility and performance did notreach a unanimous conclusion. Combined with the corporate life cycle, this paper is trying to explorefrom the perspective of a dynamic enterprises in the different stages of the life cycle to fulfill theirsocial responsibilities and performance.This paper examines the impact of corporate social responsibility on the financial performanceand market performance, the1241listed companies as research samples, which issued "CorporateSocial Responsibility Report" independently or as an attachment from2009to2011. This paperanalyzes the status quo of China’s listed companies in corporate social responsibility and relationshipbetween corporate social responsibility and performance，based on the RKS rating. And then, thearticle uses the method of Dickinson (2006), which divided the corporate life cycle stages intogrowth, maturity and recession by a combination of cash flow. Moreover, we further studied how thecorporate social responsibility impact on corporate performance in the different life-cycle. The studyresults show that:①Corporate social responsibility will help to enhance the company’s financialperformance and market performance.②The market is able to identify thebehavior of corporatesocial responsibility, but the financial performance of its reaction more fully.③In differentlife-cycle, there were significant differences in corporate social responsibility ratings andperformance: the growth stage is the golden era of corporate social responsibility, during this periodthe ratings and performance were significantly positively correlated; Recession, market performanceand corporate social responsibility has a significant positive correlation; Maturity, no significantcorrelation between.