University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: A CRICIAL
CHALLENGE FOR SMALL – AND MEDIUM-SIZED
ENTERPRISES?
Abstract
Markus Schenkel, Michael Walther
832
Corporate Responsibility (CR) is of growing relevance for companies. Especially major
enterprises increasingly align their business to social and ecological demands whereas SMEs
recently and cautiously started dealing with CR. SMEs traditionally take above average
responsibility for the local community and for their employees. Responsibility expresses itself
mainly in philanthropic activities directed at these stakeholder groups. However CR-management
in SMEs is less comprehensive than in major enterprises and not embedded within strategy and
organisation.
The strategic task for SMEs is twofold. First, CR could become a prerequisite for company
success. At the moment it seems that SMEs are not sufficiently prepared. Second, CR could even
be an opportunity for SMEs as they enjoy more public trust than major enterprises. These threats
and opportunities are discussed regarding owner-manager’s perception patterns and subsequent
roles in behaviour. This shows difficulties for SMEs to effectively deal with CR.
Keywords: Corporate Responsibility, Small and medium sized companies, Sensemaking
Introduction
Corporate Responsibility (CR) has become a basic part of corporations‘ business
policy and actions by now. Nevertheless, it seems to be mainly a topic for large
corporations. Politics, academia and the public have focused their attention on large
corporations in recent years and made sure that they take on this issue. On the other
hand, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) were empirically and theoretically
neglected and their importance for the discourse about CR often was underestimated
(Morsing & Perrini 2009), even though more than 99% of all firms world-wide are
small- or medium-sized and account for up to 70% of employment (IfM 2007). Thus,
the collective size makes SMEs highly important in the advancement of CR.
In research SMEs were – and often still are – considered to be „little big
firms“ (Tilley 2000). This ignores the fact that SMEs differ considerably from large
corporations both quantitatively and qualitatively. Among other things SMEs have a
lower level of organizational differentiation and usually only limited financial
resources due to their lower annual turnover and total assets. Even more important
than these quantitative characteristics, however are the qualitative characteristics that
distinguish small and medium from large companies and determine to a considerable
degree how and why SMEs act and behave in a specific manner. In contrast to large