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Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: A Content Analysis in Family and Non-family Firms

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Abstract

Family firms are ubiquitous and play a crucial role across all world economies, but how they differ in the disclosure of social and environmental actions from non-family firms has been largely overlooked in the literature. Advancing the discourse on corporate social responsibility reporting, we examine how family influence on a business organization affects CSR reporting. The arguments developed here draw on institutional theory, using a rich body of empirical evidence gathered through a content analysis of the CSR reports of 98 large- and medium-sized Italian firms. The grounded theory analysis informs and contextualizes several differences in the type and content of corporate social responsibility reports of family and non-family firms. Our findings show that in comparison to non-family firms, family firms disseminate a greater variety of CSR reports, are less compliant with CSR standards and place emphasis on different CSR topics. We, thus, contribute to the family business and corporate social responsibility reporting literatures in several ways, offering implications for practice and outlining promising avenues for future research.

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Notes

  1. Accountability Rating is a tool for measuring the extent to which companies have built responsible practices into the way they manage the business and their impact on the economies, societies and environments they operate in.

  2. The CSR Manager Network is a support network for CSR managers, a role that is gaining more and more relevance within firms due to the growing attention towards sustainability themes.

  3. Sodalitas Foundation was born in 1995 to build a bridge between companies and non-profit organisations and is constituted by people and enterprises driven by their commitment to social responsibility.

  4. ImprontaEtica is an Italian non-profit organisation to develop a Corporate Social Responsibility culture. It was founded in 2001 by several companies located in the Emilia-Romagna Region—especially cooperatives—which were already active in CSR.

  5. This report was provided in 2005 by the Italian Ministry for Labour and Social Policies.

  6. In the vast majority of cases, the Code of Conduct is included in the Code of Ethics. In the few cases where the Code of Conduct was a stand-alone report, we reported the findings of our analysis in the ‘Code of Conduct’ category to enable comparing the empirical results.

  7. This analysis was conducted on twelve CSR documents issued by the four pilot study firms.

  8. It is worth noting that the proportion of family firms in our sample is higher than family firms in the samples of previous comparative studies on family versus non-family firms (e.g. Cooper et al. 2005; Denison et al. 2004; Dyer and Whetten 2006; Mroczkowski and Tanewski 2007; Tsai et al. 2006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Witten Institute for Family Business, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany

    Giovanna Campopiano

  2. Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (IEED), Lancaster University Management School, Bailrigg, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK

    Alfredo De Massis

  3. Center for Young and Family Enterprise, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Alfredo De Massis

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  1. Giovanna Campopiano
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  2. Alfredo De Massis
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Correspondence to Giovanna Campopiano.

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Giovanna Campopiano and Alfredo De Massis have contributed equally to this work.

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Campopiano, G., De Massis, A. Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: A Content Analysis in Family and Non-family Firms. J Bus Ethics 129, 511–534 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2174-z

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