Contents and Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Website Reporting in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Seven-Country Study

• Published in: Business & society Vol. 57; no. 3; pp. 437 - 480
• Main Authors: Kühn, Anna-Lena, Stiglbauer, Markus, Fifka, Matthias S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.03.2018; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Companies; Corporate responsibility; Developing countries; Governance; LDCs; Philanthropy; Social responsibility; Studies; Websites; Sub-Saharan Africa; corporate social responsibility (CSR); CSR website reporting; sub-Saharan Africa
• ISSN: 0007-6503; 1552-4205
• DOI: 10.1177/0007650315614234

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries has recently received increasing attention, and scholars have pointed to the strong contextuality of CSR in the respective regions. Regarding the latter, however, sub-Saharan Africa has been scrutinized only marginally by academia. Moreover, empirical research on the impact of the institutional context has been scant, despite its attributed importance for CSR. Our article seeks to fill a part of this research gap by investigating CSR website reporting of 211 companies in seven sub-Saharan countries. The study’s aim is twofold: First, we identify to what extent sub-Saharan companies report on CSR and which contents they disclose. Second, by building on institutional theory, we investigate how the socio-economic and political environments influence CSR reporting. For this purpose, we examine the impact of country-level and company-level determinants. We find that the sample African companies’ CSR efforts focus strongly on local philanthropy and therefore differ substantially from Western CSR approaches. Furthermore, we evidence that GDP and level of governance standard positively affect CSR reporting. Our study contributes to the literature by empirically evidencing the contextuality of CSR in Africa and by explaining how specific country- and company-level determinants contribute to or hamper the development of CSR in developing countries.