Research On The Institutional Environmental Effects Of Corporate Social Responsibility Performance In China

The institutional environment constrains the corporate social responsibility(CSR)behavior.The way of organizing resources which roots in Chinese institutional context is totally different from the mature western markets due to the incompleteness of the Chinese market.Therefore,CSR behavior differs from institutional environments.However,most of the previous literature emphasize the positive role of third-party implementation mechanisms such as property rights protection,market incentives,and contract enforcement,while ignoring the self-implementation characteristics of relational contracts in China's context and the resource dependencies necessary for all stakeholders.Based on North(1991)institutional analysis theory,stakeholder theory and information asymmetry theory,this study mainly discusses the impact of formal institution,informal institution,and implementation characteristics on the performance of Chinese companies' social responsibility.Previous literature believed that the benefits of the marketization process lie in clarifying the relationship between the government and the market and raising the level of the rule of law.It provides guarantees for the competition of factor markets and product markets,thereby promoting the performance of CSR.It is true that market incentives have a positive effect on corporate social responsibility,but their degree of change will gradually level off as the degree of marketization deepens.The reason is that in the early stage of the marketization process,due to the path dependence characteristics of the planned economy and consistently government intervention,the relationship between the government and the market is not clarified,and the motivation of enterprises to fulfill their social responsibilities depends on government regulations and market mechanisms.In fact,in the process of economic transition and institutional change,the top-down market-oriented reforms have made it difficult to achieve a series of coupling of conditions based on the social order of the traditional order in the short term,thus limiting the value of the marketization process.In contrast,informal institutions based on self-enforcement play a complementary role in the process of marketization.This article emphasizes the mechanism of social capital in the concept of information sharing and mutual communication on CSR,and highlights the basic value of the informal system for CSR in the process of transformation.In addition,when considering the characteristics of the implementation of the system,this study argues that China's corporate social responsibility still needs external regulatory pressure to promote at this stage,and the implementation of external rules is related to the strength of administrative supervision.The impact of administrative supervision on corporate social responsibility lies in two aspects: First,as a listed company,its corporate social responsibility behavior is supervised and guided by financial regulatory agencies;second,the fact that China's unique administrative division and official promotion championships promote elements within the province to form a radius-centered flow on the provincial capital,so the government's information advantage for listed companies declines with increasing spatial distance.In order to reduce uncertainty,both the regulatory authorities and local governments need to pay an extra cost to monitor the company's social responsibility.Therefore,this study combines the perspective of decentralization reform and space transaction cost to design the third-party implementation characteristics of administrative supervision.Based on the classic environment-action-result analysis paradigm in strategic management,this paper uses the panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2016 to conduct an empirical test.The research results show that there exists an inverted U-shaped relationship between marketization level and CSR performance;social capital significantly positively affects corporate social responsibility performance;and social capital negatively regulates the relationship between marketization and corporate social responsibility The farther away from the financial regulatory agency,the worse the CSR performance;and the farther away from the provincial political center,the worse CSR performance.Compared with the existing literature,the possible contribution of this paper is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: First,this paper explains the nonlinear relationship between marketization process and corporate social responsibility from both theoretical analysis and empirical test,thus expanding the system of the literature on environment and corporate social responsibility.Second,this paper highlights the important role of informal institutions in the construction of corporate social responsibility,emphasizing information sharing,mutual communication,and the intrinsic relationship among stakeholders.Third,according to information economy,this article discusses the impact of administrative supervision on CSR in the spatial dimension,and provides a possible explanation for the characteristics of third-party implementation.