Original scientific paper
Nikolina Lozo
Majda Tafra-Vlahović
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility (CSR), a trend that is increasingly being manifested as a global movement towards active contribution of private sector in favour of more sustainable and ethical society, has only partially been recognised in Croatia as a source of competitive advantage for a company. In general, being fundamentally democratic in its nature, CSR is based on a dialogue with a whole range of stakeholders, who, thanks to developed technology, seek information and opportunity to engage in a dialogue on web pages of companies they are interested in. Do companies in Croatia which are recognised as socially responsible by the mere fact that they have been awarded the national awards as CSR leaders by the Croatian Chamber of Economy, which makes a sample of nine companies of different sizes, indeed use this easily accessible and unavoidable channel to communicate with their external stakeholders, and how they do it is a subject that would need to be further investigated. This research paves the way by analysing the allegedly most successful among them with methods of content analysis, comparison, interview and experiment.
Four hypotheses have been constructed based on four research questions about the level of usage of web pages, the tools used to communicate with stakholders, usage of dialogic potential of web pages and use of social networks, all in function of CSR. The fourth hypothesis according to which they insuffi ciently use social networks for the same purpose was also confirmed. In addition the experiment has shown unwillingness of companies to engage in a dialogue with external stakeholder of high interest and low power to affect the company.
The research has shown only informative use of web pages and absence of using their dialogue potential which somehow then raises a question of validity ofembedment of CSR principles in the company practice and points to a big area of improvement. The authors propose a set of recommendations to improve company web pages to use their full potential for CSR engagement.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
118646
URI
Publication date:
4.6.2012.
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