E-corporate social responsibility in socially responsible firms: the case of Spanish firms

Abstract

The design and the content of a website that is positively valued by the firm's stakeholders can become a source of competitive advantage. In recent years, information on the extent to which the firm undertakes its social responsibility and environmental protection efforts is gaining increasing interest among the agents with whom it interacts. The aim of this paper is to analyse e-corporate social responsibility in firms listed in the socially responsible investment index FTSE4Good Ibex, focusing on the type of information concerning the corporate social responsibility, which this type of firms provides via their websites.

Keywords:

• corporate social responsibility
• transparency
• firms
• competitive advantage
• socially responsible investment
• Spain

Notes

Interest in CSR has been shown by numerous agencies, governmental organisations such as the UN, OECD, ILO, European Commission, the Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability, GRI, the International Organisation for Standardisation, among others, leading to the existence of a myriad of standards, principles or recommendations (Global Compact, OECD Guidelines, ILO Declarations, Green Paper, AA1000, SA-8000, Guide GRI3, SGE21, PNE165010, among others) that state voluntary guidelines for the implementation of CSR. Given this great diversity of documentation, work is currently being done internationally for the development of a document, ISO 26000, which allows for standardisation, but which will also be voluntary and will not be certifiable.

The expert forum on Corporate Social Responsibility of the Ministerio De Trabajo Y Asuntos Sociales (2005) has defined it as ‘In addition to strict compliance with existing legal obligations, the voluntary integration in its governance and management, in its strategy, policies and procedures, social concerns, labour, environmental and respect for human rights, arising from the relationship and transparent dialogue with its stakeholders, taking responsibility and liability and impacts arising from their actions’.

The FTSE4Good index is a regional series of the FTSE4Good index, designed as a Spanish indicator of socially responsible investing, including Spanish firms that meet globally recognised standards of CSR.

See Sigala (2009) on the role of web 2.0 in customer participation.

Long-term relationships can lead to setting up formal and informal networks as an integral part of the organisation. For a more detailed study, see Fuller-Love (2009).

The sustainability reports try to show the performance of the organisation in three dimensions, financial, social and environmental, thus allowing accountability to stakeholders.

Non-governmental organisation that has developed a common framework for the preparation of reports, known as A guide to developing sustainability reports or ‘G3’.

See ‘KLD Europe Sustainability Index’, http://www.kld.com/indexes/esi/index.html

The Securities Market Law 26/2003 of 17 July, amending Law 24/1988 of 28 July, and the unified text of the Corporations Act, approved by the Royal Legislative Decree 1564/1989 of 22 December establishes certain obligations as regards the transfer of market information on corporate governance practices, such as the requirement to have a website with relevant information from its corporate governance in order to enhance the transparency of listed firms.

Methodology for the determination of this index has followed the work of Gandía and Andrés (2005) on e-government and corporate transparency of information.

In applying the model, it has been necessary to previously turn the data into a matrix of distances or dissimilarities, on which the MSD technique is applied in order to obtain the coordinates of the 29 firms on two dimensions, which may be represented graphically.

The RSQ is a measure of how well the original data fits the model of MDS (Luque, 2000).

Kruskal (1964) suggested the following interpretations for stress: 0.2 poor; 0.1 acceptable; 0.05 good; 0.0 excellent.