How do companies invest in corporate social responsibility? : an ordonomic contribution for empirical CSR research / Matthias Will und Stefan Hielscher

Abstract

This paper takes both a conceptual and an empirical approach to answer the question of how CSR can be connected to the company’s role as an agent of social value creation that operates within an imperfect institutional framework of market competition. To develop a functional design for an empirical study, we draw on the concept of ordonomics, which provides a heuristics of how companies can use morality as a factor of production. Drawing on ordonomics, we derive three central questions: In what CSR activities do companies engage in the course of their day-to-day business? How can win-win solutions be realized through strategic rule commitments? In what stakeholder dialogues do companies engage in order to discuss and find functional rules for organizing win-win solutions? Linked with a combined factor analysis and dynamic panel estimation, this empirical approach yields new insights into the relationship between CSP and CFP. As control variables we use company fundamentals and the evaluations of CSR and finance managers. In a reduced pre-study, we reveal some first insight into the CSP-CFP link and generate several new hypotheses to be the subject of a further major study.