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Thoughts on the Evaluation of Corporate Social Performance Through Projects

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Abstract

Corporate social performance (CSP) has become a widely applied concept, discussed in most large firms’ corporate reports and the academic literature alike. Unfortunately, CSP has largely been employed as a way of demonstrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) in practice, or to justify the business case for CSR in academia by relating some measure of CSP to some measure of financial performance. In this article, we discuss multiple shortcomings to these approaches. We argue that (1) CSR activities need to be managed and measured as projects and aggregated to the business or corporate level using a project portfolio; (2) appropriate measures need to be identified that move away from reporting the firm’s activities toward quantifying actual social outcomes achieved; and (3) given the types of projects prevalent in CSR, statistical evaluation methods common in other fields (ideally, pre-test post-test control group designs, such as used in medicine or propensity score matching for ongoing or past projects) should be employed to properly measure outcomes. We make a first, albeit imperfect, attempt at using such an approach with data collected on behalf of the Patrimonio Hoy project, a well-publicized CSR initiative carried out by Cemex in Mexico. We show that the results from this data reinforce concerns voiced earlier in this article.

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Notes

  1. For a more complete treatment of pre-test post-test control group designs, see Duflo et al. (2007).

  2. The formula applied is: n = (n′)/[1 + (n′/N)], where the preliminary sample n′ = (s 2/V 2), for which s 2 = (p)(q) is the sample variance and V 2 is the population variance, equal to the square of the standard error. The specific samples for each stratum were obtained based on the weights with respect to the total population that represents the specific population of each stratum.

  3. To establish significance, the scale’s mid-point (e.g., 3 for a 5-point scale) was used as a contrast.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to extend their heartfelt thanks to Cemex and the managers who supported this project and generously provided their time to researchers at various stages in its development. In addition, the authors would like to thank the JBE reviewer who provided substantial guidance to the improvement of this manuscript. The authors alone are responsible for any errors that may remain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economics Department/ITESM, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Ave. Eugenio Garza Sada 2501 Sur, Col. Tecnológico, C.P. 64849, Monterrey, NL, Mexico

    José Salazar & Bryan W. Husted

  2. Schulich School of Business, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Bryan W. Husted & Markus Biehl

Authors
  1. José Salazar
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  2. Bryan W. Husted
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  3. Markus Biehl
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Correspondence to Bryan W. Husted.

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Salazar, J., Husted, B.W. & Biehl, M. Thoughts on the Evaluation of Corporate Social Performance Through Projects. J Bus Ethics 105, 175–186 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0957-z

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