Beyond Good Intentions: Designing CSR Initiatives for Greater Social Impact

Do CSR studies actually help assess firms' social impact?

The article Beyond Good Intentions: Designing CSR Initiatives for Greater Social Impact » maps 6,254 articles addressing corporate CSR performance over the past 50 years.

The authors Michael Barnett, Irene Henriques, and Bryan Husted then conduct a detailed analysis of recent highly cited CSR studies, categorising their dependent variables using a logic model framework from development studies.

Their conclusions include:

• The CSR literature has progressed beyond just measuring firm financial performance, with studies integrating ESG outcomes.
• Highly-cited CSR studies primarily measure CSR activities and outputs rather than the ultimate social impacts.
• Very few studies demonstrate that CSR initiatives achieve their intended societal benefits. Overall, the literature falls short of assessing the actual social impact of CSR initiatives.
• The literature's focus on exploiting large secondary datasets and big data analyses has proven inadequate to advance the assessment of CSR's social impact.
• The paper argues CSR researchers should formulate and rigorously test CSR initiatives aimed at achieving specific social and environmental objectives to confirm and measure their impact.

The study highlights the need to move beyond correlational analyses and towards experimental, design-oriented research to better assess and improve the social impact of CSR initiatives.

Policymakers may use these results to incentivise firms to shift towards small data research designs that can better determine causation in CSR initiatives.

Capturing the full complexity of CSR's societal impacts beyond just measurable outcomes presents challenges that may not be fully overcome by this study's method and underlying data.