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

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). Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, Index, SMEs, Scoping review, Clarity of CSR index output