A new perspective on corporate social responsibility in emerging markets: An empirical study of foreign retail firms in china

Research interest in examining corporate social responsibility (CSR) in emerging markets ison the rise. For one thing, corporate's so-defined "'responsibilities'are typically associatedwith American and European perceived societal or stakeholder obligations which may meandifferently to emerging economies where their economic, social and legal institutions areundergoing unprecedented changes; for another, we know very little about the substantive roleand concrete effects of government in emerging markets on corporate governance in that arefirms simply comply to or actively negotiate with the government in terms of formulatingtheir firm CSR strategies'In this chapter, the author aims to bridge this gap with an empirical investigation into thespecific CSR strategies that global firms have developed in the world's largest emergingeconomy and a nominally communist country, namely China. Drawing on institutional theoryand a relational governance perspective, the author finds that rather than adopting a canonicalholistic CSR stakeholder model as typically observed in Western countries, foreign retailers inChina generally adopt a preferential stakeholder model using government-aimed andconsumer-aimed CSR strategically.The empirical study sampled 17 global retailers operating in China, with a datasetcompiled to include their CSR web announcement data and firm performance data. The resultsof partial least squares modeling suggest that only government-aimed CSR plays a salient rolein enhancing retailers' performance. Findings from this study greatly shed light on thecorporate governance in China, and the author believes such findings are applicable to otheremerging markets where their legal frameworks function less efficiently but theirgovernments exert considerable influences on firm behavior.am