<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold>Background and Purpose:</bold> Regular reporting on Corporate Social Responsibility (hereinafter referred to as CSR) should make it easier for enterprises to identify the sustainability risks and lead to an increased investors and consumers’ confidence. The aim of the paper is to find out how the indices which evaluate the socially responsible behaviour of enterprises are constructed.<bold>Design/Methodology/Approach:</bold> The scoping review is the method used in this study. The scoping question is: What do we know about the construction of indices evaluating the socially responsible behaviour of organisations from the existing expert resources?<bold>Results:</bold> The analysis of 20 papers shows that there is no consensus about the method of determining the weights and constructing the index. There are 4 approaches to the aggregated index construction. The first one uses the percentage of filling the specific criteria or the average of values of specific dimensions of the index. The second one uses the multi-criteria decision-making methods (most often the Analytical hierarchical process method). The third one uses unconventional linguistic models and fuzzy logic and finally, the fourth one uses the factor analysis or the method of the main components.<bold>Conclusion:</bold> The main feature of CSR indices lies in their methodological disunity. It complicates the understanding of the CSR outputs and essentially makes it impossible to create a CSR performance ranking, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (hereinafter referred to as SMEs).</abstract>

Background and Purpose: Regular reporting on Corporate Social Responsibility (hereinafter referred to as CSR) should make it easier for enterprises to identify the sustainability risks and lead to an increased investors and consumers’ confidence. The aim of the paper is to find out how the indices which evaluate the socially responsible behaviour of enterprises are constructed.Design/Methodology/Approach: The scoping review is the method used in this study. The scoping question is: What do we know about the construction of indices evaluating the socially responsible behaviour of organisations from the existing expert resources?Results: The analysis of 20 papers shows that there is no consensus about the method of determining the weights and constructing the index. There are 4 approaches to the aggregated index construction. The first one uses the percentage of filling the specific criteria or the average of values of specific dimensions of the index. The second one uses the multi-criteria decision-making methods (most often the Analytical hierarchical process method). The third one uses unconventional linguistic models and fuzzy logic and finally, the fourth one uses the factor analysis or the method of the main components.Conclusion: The main feature of CSR indices lies in their methodological disunity. It complicates the understanding of the CSR outputs and essentially makes it impossible to create a CSR performance ranking, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (hereinafter referred to as SMEs).

Construction and Significance of Corporate Social Responsibility Indices – from Results to the Essence

Faculty of Economics and Administration - Department of Corporate Economy

Organizacija

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Background and Purpose: Regular reporting on Corporate Social Responsibility (hereinafter referred to as CSR) should make it easier for enterprises to identify...

Construction and Significance of Corporate Social Responsibility Indices – from Results to the Essence

Published Online: Sep 02, 2020

Page range: 212 - 226

Received: Jul 11, 2019

Accepted: Jul 08, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/orga-2020-0014

Keywords
Corporate Social Responsibility, Index, SMEs, Scoping review, Clarity of CSR index outputs

© 2020 Dana Bernardová et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Construction and Significance of Corporate Social Responsibility Indices – from Results to the Essence

Published Online: Sep 02, 2020

Page range: 212 - 226

Received: Jul 11, 2019

Accepted: Jul 08, 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/orga-2020-0014

KeywordsCorporate Social Responsibility, Index, SMEs, Scoping review, Clarity of CSR index outputs

© 2020 Dana Bernardová et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
Corporate Social Responsibility, Index, SMEs, Scoping review, Clarity of CSR index outputs