University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

The first variable concerns the inclusion of social responsibility elements in the
company’s vision or mission statement, as an indicator of commitment to CSR issues,
and of the relevance given to CSR in the running of the business. Analysis of CSR
objectives is aimed at evaluating whether a company sets quantitative targets relating
to CSR, and whether these are treated as equally important to strategic objectives by
being included in the management reward system. Centrality with respect to the core
business measures to what extent CSR initiatives are linked to the business, utilize
the company’s competencies and skills, and are useful for product or process
innovation. Stakeholder involvement regards the firm's ability to identify its priority
stakeholders, engage them in dialogue, and involve them in the decisional process.
Strategic partnerships in the sphere of CSR are long term relationships that the
company maintains with other social actors such as NGOs, governments or
institutions, to collaboratively implement projects that can benefit both the business
and society. For evaluating the adoption of standard systems and tools, four main
variables were identified, that reflect to what extent a company has implemented
formalized management systems and organizational tools dedicated to CSR:
organizational department, management systems, performance measurement system,
and documents. A company can have an organizational department devoted to CSR,
or it can appoint a CSR manager, or create other formalized roles at different
hierarchical levels in charge of handling CSR; it can implement standard
management systems relating to different areas of the CSR agenda, or it can develop
its own customized management system for CSR; it can select Key performance
indicators for its CSR performance measurement system drawn from international
standards such as GRI, or develop its own indicators; finally, it can produce formal
documents for CSR, such as ethical codes, value statements or sustainability reports,
which can be certified by an independent auditor. All of the evaluation variables
were scored on three levels (high, medium, or low), according to the evaluation grid
shown in Appendix A.¨
Sample Selection
The sample of companies for the study was selected starting from a previous survey
on CSR management, conducted in 2006 on a group of 150 large companies, banks
and insurance firms included in the Mediobanca listing of “The Principal Italian
Companies” (Mediobanca, 2006). Research focused on big companies because they
are more likely to have sufficient commitment to CSR to be worth investigating,
especially with respect to the implementation of CSR management, performance
measurement and reporting systems. First, out of the 150 companies of the starting
sample, only those that had their headquarters in Italy were selected. This because
CSR is always managed fairly centrally, and it would have been misleading to
interview the CSR managers of non-Italian firms whose CSR policies and initiatives
are planned and controlled by the headquarters in the company’s home country.
According to the findings of a previous study, a company's approach to CSR is
influenced by the industry in which it operates, and by whether or not it has a global
presence, particularly in developing countries. Although it was not the aim of this
research to validate the results of this preceding work, the sample was constructed in
varied way with respect to these parameters. Accordingly, the final sample of 10
firms included both domestic and multinational companies belonging to different
88