The respondents also recognize the internet as the best avenue for making one’s corporate social responsibility known to the public. Ninety five percent of the respondents (95%) believe that the internet is the best avenue for making one’s corporate responsibility known whilst only five percent believe that there are other communication strategies that could be used in making one’s corporate social responsibility known.
Although the respondents’ answer vary when asked why corporate social responsibility is important, they all believe in the fact that this is important for a certain organization, thus one hundred percent (100%) of the respondents believe that this should be inherent in most organizations.
They also believe in the importance of public practices in order to make the public aware of corporate social responsibility, which could be essential to the success of their businesses.
One hundred percent of the respondents also show that based on their experience, public relations played a very important role in changing the image of their company that significantly affects the profit they receive.
Public relations, after all tremendously alter businesses. People tend to get impressed when an image of a certain company is positively shown which then significantly affects sale of products and or services. ? As seen in this study, corporate social responsibility is essential in increasing the profits of most corporations.
The concept of corporate reputation has been extensively investigated in the fields of economics (Shapiro, 1983; Wilson, 1985; Kreps & Wilson, 1982; Milgrom & Roberts, 1982, 1986) and corporate strategy (Weigelt & Carnerer, 1988; Fombrum, & Shanley, 1990; Shamsie, 2003).
Herbig and Milewicz (1995, p. 18) have defined reputation as “an estimation of the consistency over time of an attribute of an entity”, and emphasize the fact that an organization can have several reputations, one for each attribute such as price, product quality, innovativeness, management quality – or a global reputation.
The development of reputation research is based on the vision of imperfect information in which actors depend on proxies and signals to make logical assumptions about the intentions and future behaviors of other actors (Fombrum & Shanley, 1990). Thus, reputation models presume a strong coupling between past actions and future expectations, and organizational attributes and the assessment of firms (Weigelt & Camerer, 1988).
The importance of corporate reputation in the management field is dependent on the fact that corporate audiences routinely rely on the reputations of organizations in making investment decisions, career decisions and product choices (Dowling, 1986). In addition, reputational advantages that are borne out of informational asymmetries can provide firms with a valuable resource that they can use against their rivals for a relatively long period of time (Shamsie, 2003).
The intangible nature of reputation, its rarity and social complexity, makes it hard to trade and copy; therefore, reputation can contribute significantly to performance differences among organizations (Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993). Corporate Trustworthiness The importance of the concept of trustworthiness is closely linked to the development of trust and trusting behavior literature. Trusting behavior suggests permitting oneself to be in a potentially vulnerable position relative to another, while possessing some knowledge of the other that inspires trust in his goodwill i. e. in his good intentions (Blomqvist, 1997). Thus, risk and some information about the potentially trusted person or situation are seen as necessary conditions for trust to exist (Lewis & Weiger, 1985; Oakes, 1990). This information about the potentially trusted person can be used to deduct the future behavior of the person. Along the same line, Good (1988) indicated that trust is based on expectations of how another person will behave, based on that person’s present and past implicit and explicit claims.
In a similar position, Mayer, Davis & Schoorman (1995), in their comprehensive research, determined more than ten different individual and organizational traits that lead to trust, resuming these concepts into three constructs: ability, benevolence and integrity. In a similar setting, Blomqvist (1997) identified two main dimensions of trustworthiness, named competence and goodwill. Competence encompasses technical capabilities, skills and know-how, while goodwill suggests moral responsibility and positive intentions towards the others.
Nonetheless, these organizational traits are hard to observe directly, making difficult the evaluations of corporate trustworthiness (Barney & Hansen, 1994). These concepts can be very essential to companies who would want to increase their profits. It is because of this that this study gives importance to public relations in making corporate social responsibility known to the general public. Public relations, after all tremendously alter businesses.
People tend to get impressed when an image of a certain company is positively shown which then significantly affects sale of products and or services. Findings For majority of the companies who served as samples for this study, the issues related to CSR are of great importance. This is evident as most of the company websites examined have devoted a section dedicated to corporate social responsibility/corporate citizenship/sustainable development issues and that these sections are usually found in the most relevant levels of their websites, majority can be found in the home page.
Obviously, the presence of this section shows the explicit recognition of the said issues. In the same manner, this serves as the companies’ recognition of the importance of corporate social responsibility on their corporate websites. They also place them between the second and third hierarchical levels which again reveal their importance. However, it is also obvious enough that these corporations have not maximized their use of communication strategies in making their social responsibility known.
Recommendations For future researchers on the said topic, the author of this study recommends a case study focusing on the patrons of the aforementioned companies instead of the representatives of each organization. Through this, future research could give importance to the perception of the public on the said topic. It is also through this that one could prove that corporate social responsibility, displayed in the websites, truly provide a legitimating activity for the organization in the society.
In the same manner, the public could also share their opinions and views on corporate responsibility, how important it is for them and how it affects their loyalty to a certain organization. The author of this study also recommends a case study of two different companies with different backgrounds on corporate social responsibility. In doing so, future researchers would look at how profits were affected because of publishing their CSR over the internet.
It is also recommended that future researchers look into the disadvantages being faced by companies (if there are any) who do not publish their corporate social responsibility over the World Wide Web. For another research that shall look into public relations, it is recommended to look into the other communication strategies that companies use in making their consumers aware of their corporate social responsibility. Lastly, the author also recommends a study that would look into the best way of transmitting social responsibility messages to the public. A case study of such could help companies in making their businesses better.
This could also help companies in devising strategies that would be beneficial to their businesses, ensuring that the money they reserve for public relations and corporate social responsibility shall be maximized and in the same way; that their programs would be advantageous to their businesses.
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