China’s CSR Has Both Common and Unique Dimensions as Compared with Western CSR

XU Shangkun1 ( 徐尚昆) and YANG Rudai2 ( 杨汝岱)
1Ph.D Candidate of the School of Business at the Renmin University of China
2Ph.D Candidate of China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University. Lecturer, Business School of Xiangtan University.

The concept of corporate social responsibility was first broached in the early 1920s, and has been generally recognized in western society since the 1970s. After the arrival of the new millennium, corporate social responsibility has also been accepted by China’s government and all social circles, with an increasing number of enterprises jumping onto the bandwagon of fulfilling social responsibility. However, there also exists discrepancies between China and western countries in their understanding of corporate social responsibility due to their differences in economic development phases, social system and cultural background. In this article, the authors conduct a comparative study between China and western countries with respect to the concepts and dimensions of corporate social responsibility based on the findings of a survey of 630 CEOs or business owners in 12 provinces and municipalities across China.

I. Statement of issue

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) was first broached by Oliver Sheldon in 1924 and CSR has since been onstrued to mean that corporations not only have economic and legal obligations but also assume social responsibilities beyond these obligations. Based on the study of his predecessors, Carroll advanced a brand new conceptual framework in 1979. Carroll took CSR as the sum of obligations that an enterprise was expected by society to fulfill, and built a four-dimensional CSR model that was generally adopted in academia. In spite of numerous empirical studies of CSR conception and classification in the academic circle, we have over recent years seen...

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