A Contrastive Study Of Oil Companies’ CSR Reports Based On Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

According to Chinese Ministry of Commerce,2014can be said the first year for Chinese corporations to go out because the year witnessed that the amount of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) exceeded foreign investment in China for the first time. Also, Chinese Outward Investment Index Report published by Economics Intellectual Units predicts that China would be the largest net investment country in the world in2017. The quick development and huge potential of Chinese OFDI have aroused wide-ranging attention from home and abroad, among which corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance by Chinese corporations are in dispute.CSR means that besides gaining benefits, corporations should also shoulder their responsibility towards related groups such as the employee, the customer and the community. The performance of CSR influences, to some degree, even decides the survival and development of a corporation. At the same time, some researches indicate that different cultures have different understandings of CSR. Therefore, corporations under different cultural backgrounds would take dissimilar measures. Thus, it is important for corporations under different cultural backgrounds to be aware of different understandings of CSR and different measures taken if they want to be accepted by foreign citizens, media and governments.Based on this, the author conducts a contrastive study of two oil companies. One is China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the other is ExxonMobil (EM). The author chooses the English versions of CSR reports of the two oil companies from2011to2013as samples. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is the five cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede, which are individualism and collectivism, power distance, femininity and masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and long-versus short-term orientation. The author also adopts the four elements introduced by the "father of CSR"-Carroll, which are stakeholders, issues, orientations and decision-making autonomy. Starting from Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions, the author makes a contrastive study of the two companies in terms of the four elements. Hereby, the author analyzes the cultural influence on attitudes and actions by corporations and the functioning of culture in causing those divergences.The study indicates that, with different cultural backgrounds, CNPC and EM perform their social responsibility in different manners. Influenced by high collectivism, high masculinity, low uncertainty avoidance and long power distance, CNPC stresses economic issues and interacts with the government more frequently. It endows its affiliates and branches with more decision-making autonomy. Also, laws and regulations are relatively more elastic. Meanwhile, the American culture is characteristic of high individualism, relatively high femininity, high uncertainty avoidance and short power distance, which influence the CSR performance of EM. Its reports present that EM attaches more importance to noneconomic issues and to communication with stakeholders. It endows affiliates and branches less decision-making autonomy and worships the authority of laws and regulations. At the same time, some indicators show that different cultural values merge with each other.In the end, the author advocates that faced with the expansion of Chinese foreign investment, both Chinese investors and local investment recipient should learn more from each other so as to boost bilateral cultural exchanges and achieve win-win results on the basis of understanding the cultural causes of specific attitudes and measures taken by both sides.