CSR Measurement in India: A Scale Development Study

Corporate Social responsibility (CSR) is no longer considered as an optional add-on activity of business. It has now become imperative for business to engage in CSR. But the concept has been fraught with measurement difficulties which are causing hindrances for companies to embrace it fully. This paper seeks to take a look at the various attempts to capture the elusive concept of CSR using various measurement tools, problems associated with those tools and evolves a measurement instrument in the context of emerging economies like India. The purpose of this study is to provide an original, valid, and reliable measure of CSR reflecting the responsibilities of a business to various stakeholders. Based on a proposed conceptual framework of CSR, the scale developed and validated by Turker (2009) was adopted, moderated and validated through a systematic scale development process. In the study, exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the underlying structure of the data. Data was collected from 142 business professionals working in India. The results of the analysis provided a Six-dimensional structure of CSR, including CSR to Shareholders, Employees, Customers, Government, Society and Non-social stakeholders of Natural Environment and Posterities. The research paper contributes to the literature by way of evolving valid instrument to measure of CSR performance in the context of emerging economies like India.