Government Subsidies And Corporate Social Responsibility Decoupling

The concept of corporate social responsibility has become the focus of academic research and corporate practice.Many enterprises have incorporated it into corporate strategic management and actively carried out social responsibility activities.However,the phenomenon of alienation called decoupling of social responsibility has occurred repeatedly.Many enterprises chant social responsibility slogans and publicize social responsibility behavior,but do nothing privately,and even have various violations of management,quality problems,safety accidents,environmental pollution and other social responsibility loss events.The decoupling of social responsibility covers up the default behavior in the process of corporate social responsibility practice,and exaggerates the actual performance of corporate social responsibility,which is a kind of hypocritical behavior that is both formal and inconsistent.As an important target for the country to promote the industrial development and transformation,the heavy pollution industry has received the attention and support of the government.The government allocates resources and macro-regulates the industry by issuing government subsidies to enterprises,and promotes the implementation of industrial policies.Therefore,this paper attempts to examine whether government subsidies can inhibit the decoupling of corporate social responsibility in the heavy pollution industry,with a view to helping the government and relevant policy departments better allocate resources and improve policies,and warning relevant enterprises to regulate their own social responsibility behavior,so as to achieve consistency between words and deeds.This paper takes decoupling of corporate social responsibility as the main research object,and focuses on the heavy pollution industry based on the era background of "green development" proposed in the report of the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.First of all,on the basis of combing the relevant literature of social responsibility decoupling at home and abroad,this paper takes signal theory,institutional theory,legitimacy theory,etc.as the theoretical basis,and combines the current situation of China’s heavy pollution industry and the institutional background of green development,discusses the inhibition effect of government subsidies on corporate social responsibility decoupling,provides a new governance perspective for social responsibility decoupling,and enriches the relevant domestic research on decoupling.Secondly,this paper further introduces the level of risk taking as an intermediary variable,and deeply studies the specific mechanism and impact path of government subsidies affecting social responsibility decoupling.Finally,this paper selects 331 heavily polluting enterprises from 2015-2021 as the sample,takes corporate social responsibility decoupling as the explanatory variable,government subsidies as the explanatory variable,and risk bearing level as the intermediary variable to construct a fixed-effect regression model of panel data,and uses statistical analysis software STATA16.0 for empirical testing.Finally,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)After receiving government subsidies,heavily polluting enterprises will reduce corporate social responsibility decoupling behavior;(2)After obtaining government subsidies,the risk bearing level of heavy pollution enterprises will be reduced;(3)Government subsidies can reduce the decoupling of corporate social responsibility by reducing the level of risk bearing of enterprises;(4)Risk taking plays an intermediary role in the decoupling of government subsidies and social responsibilities.The conclusions of this paper are helpful to expand the application scenarios of government subsidies,and help the government and relevant departments better allocate resources and improve policies;It also enriches the research results of domestic social responsibility decoupling,and provides a new decision-making reference for reducing corporate social responsibility decoupling and improving the implementation efficiency of social responsibility activities.