Was CSR in our minds? The relevance of CSR in the vision and mission of Indian companies through the lens of ownership

What is it about?

The paper uses the neo-institutional theory approach which explains similarities and differences in the CSR practices of organizations embedded within (and between) similar sectoral contexts. The study accounts the CSR activities of the BSE-100 companies based on their ownership and checks the overlap of the CSR activities conducted by the companies with the ongoing social development schemes launched in India during the same of time. The time period between 2017-2020 is chosen to analyse the CSR studies. The study uses content analysis technique to derive conclusions. A textual analysis of top 100 listed firms across all ownership groups aimed at understanding patterns of CSR practices opted by the different groups and coherence of CSR patterns in the V&M statements. CSR related keywords were analysed in the V&M statements to understand what influence reporting of CSR practices in the strategic communication of firms. Overall analysis indicated that top 100 firms prefer to invest in the areas of ‘Education’, ‘Sustainability’ ‘Skill’ where public owned firms preferred towards ‘Sanitation’ and ‘Environment/Sustainability’ showing concurrence with local development goals. Private and foreign groups preferred to park their CSR funds in ‘Education’ and ‘Skill’ development showing coherence with the global agendas. Public owned firms tend to report more CSR related keywords, specifically “Environment’ and ‘Sustainability’ in the strategic documents. However, private and foreign firms do not pay any significance to CSR related keywords in their V&M statements.

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