University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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However neither Japan nor Germany is evaluated as a good contributor to CSR for
which environmental protection plays a significant role. For instance, ‘National
Corporate Responsibility Index (NCRI)’ issued by the cooperation program of the
think tank ‘Copenhagen Centre’ and the British government ranked Japan and
Germany 18 th and 9 th of OECD countries 2 . In addition to that, their self-image about
CSR is also surprisingly low. Habisch and Wegner (2004) said that Germany is
likely to be a ‘white spot’ on the European CSR landscape, or more, CSR “has been
ignored for a long time not only by business but also by other sectors including
NGOs as well as the government”(Backhaus-Maul 2008). In Japan also many
scholars think Japan is still a country which imports CSR (Fujii 2005). A consensus
about CSR in Japan and Germany is that both have seriously observed CSR since the
beginning of the 21 st century.
As long as I know there are many empirical literatures focusing on the current
development of acknowledge about CSR and the historical picture of CSR in both
countries, but just few try to explore what and how blocked CSR development in
Japan and Germany or how the linkage of CSR and environmental protection has
changed there. Especially there are very little comparative analyses of CSR
development of these two countries.
This paper thus tries to offer the idea how we can compare the path of CSR
development cross nationally from the perspective of barriers. I know that this
suggestion sounds tricky. However this should make an interesting comparative view
for CSR researches which mostly pick up best practices.
Framework of the Research
Research Agenda
Japan and Germany are for me very interesting cases because they are likely to have
started to discuss about CSR at the same period, namely in the beginning of the 21 st
century. However they did not start their discussion from scratch. In fact Japanese
and German companies have the tradition of contributions to the society. Besides
high engagement in corporate environmental management including ISO 14001,
“Sampo-Yoshi” in Japan and “organisierte Bürgerschaft“in Germany are the
argument often seized as the traditional examples of Japan and Germany’s CSR.
They are likely not to have sufficiently used their potential of CSR although they
have a tradition of social contribution. Questions are therefore why they did not
relatively low engage in CSR and what drove or hampered the development of CSR
in both countries. As above argued, it is often said that Japan and Germany started to
seriously observe CSR in the beginning of 21 st century. This paper looks at the
situation changed at that time, exactly to say the period from the end of the 20 th
century to 2003 is targeted in this paper. Through looking at what diminished or was
weakened at that time, this paper would explore the barriers blocked the development
of CSR, and differences or similarities of changes in two countries.
2 For more details see: (EABIS and AccountAbility 2005)