Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives:An Analysis of Voluntary Corporate Disclosure

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of involvement of companies in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives in terms of high, medium and low CSR performers. Secondary data based on a sample of 93 companies operating in India have been analyzed by applying content analysis of annual reports and individual websites of the companies. Extent of social involvement of the companies has been observed on the basis of their respective social scores. The results indicate that some firms are highly involved, some are moderately involved while others are lowly involved in CSR arena. The study further reveals that firms are highly concerned about their shareholders followed by human resources. The firms are found to be highly engaged in providing retirement fund benefit plans and least percentage of companies has been found to be engaged in providing employment to SC/ST/BC and disabled persons. By applying Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U-test the study reveals that there is a significant difference between the average overall CSR scores of different categories of CSR performers. The major limitation of the study is that CSR measurement is based on voluntary disclosures by the companies. Better measures of CSR are, therefore, desperately needed for future studies.