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- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
There have been multiple calls for research on consumers' responses to social issues, regulatory changes, and corporate behavior. Thus, this dissertation proposes and tests a conceptual framework of parents' responses to government regulations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) that address juvenile obesity. This research builds on Attribution Theory to examine the impact of government regulations and CSR on consumers' attitudes and their subsequent behavior. Three pilot studies and three main experiments were conducted; a between-subjects and randomized experimental design being used to capture the effects of regulations and corporate actions on product satisfaction, company evaluations, and behavioral intentions, while examining the mediating role of attributions of responsibility for a negative product outcome. This research has implications for policy makers and marketing practitioners and scholars. This is the first study to offer a new perspective, based on attributions of blame, to explain the mechanism that drives consumers' responses to government regulations. Considering numerous calls for government actions that address childhood obesity, it is important to understand how and why consumers respond to such regulations. The results illustrated that certain policies may have unintended consequences due to unexpected attributions of blame for unhealthy products. Only recently have researchers tried to address the psychological mechanism through which CSR has an impact on consumers' attitudes and behavior. To date, few studies have investigated attributions as a mediating variable in the transfer of CSR associations on consumer responses. Nonetheless, this is the first study that concentrates on attributions of responsibility, per se, to explain the impact of CSR on company evaluations. This dissertation extends previous research, where locus, stability, and controllability mediated the relationship between CSR and attributions of blame; the degree of blame being consequential to brand evaluations. The current results suggest that attributions of responsibility, per se, mediate the impact of CSR on company evaluations. Additionally, attributions of blame are measured as the degree to which consumers take personal responsibility for a negative product outcome. This highlights a new role of the CSR construct, as a moderator of consumers' self-serving bias, a fundamental psychological response that has been neglected in the marketing literature.
ContributorsDumitrescu, Claudia (Author) / Shaw Hughner, Renée (Thesis advisor) / Schmitz, Troy G. (Committee member) / Seperich, George (Committee member) / Shultz, Ii, Clifford J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis explores the relationship between introversion and individual commitment to corporate social responsibility. Research was gathered from a survey that classifies respondents as introverts or extroverts, and analyzes perceptions and commitment to social responsibility both on an organizational and personal behavior level. Findings from the study show that introverts are not more likely than extroverts to prioritize social responsibility at work or through their personal lives. However, there is evidence in this study that introverts think about corporate social responsibility and its effects on business success in a different way than extroverts. Introverts focus on avoiding risk, and they may be more prone than extroverts to see business success and social responsibility as two opposing forces. Introverts also perceive a wider gap between the current state of prioritization for CSR responsibilities and what they feel this prioritization should be. This study has a number of practical implications for business leaders hoping to increase commitment to CSR within an organization while drawing on the strengths of each personality type. Recommendations for increasing commitment to CSR are based on survey findings and research from secondary sources.
ContributorsSprayberry, Alex Bowen (Author) / LePine, Marcie (Thesis director) / Spierre Clark, Susan (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Management (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Firms are increasingly being held accountable for the unsustainable actions of their suppliers. Stakeholders, regulatory agencies, and customers alike are calling for increased levels of transparency and higher standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance for suppliers. While it is apparent that supplier performance is important, it remains unclear how the stock market weighs the CSR performance of a supplier relative to that of a focal firm. This dissertation focuses on whether these relative differences exist. In addition to capturing the magnitude of the difference in market impact between focal firm and supplier CSR events; I analyze the ways in which these differences have changed over time. To capture this evolution, CSR events ranging over a period from 1994 to 2013 are examined. This research utilizes an event study methodology in which the announcement of over 2,300 CSR events are identified and analyzed to determine the subsequent stock market reaction. I find that while the market evaluated negative supplier CSR events less harshly than events occurring at the buying firm in the early years of the sample, by the turn of the millennium this “supplier discounting" had disappeared. The analysis is broken down by CSR event "type". Findings demonstrate that negative CSR events, particularly those revolving around worker or customer safety, generate the most significant abnormal return. The findings of this dissertation produce valuable managerial insights along with interpretation. Resources are scarce, and understanding where a firm might best allocate their resources to avoid financial penalties will be valuable information for corporate decision makers. These findings present clear evidence that some of these resources should be allocated to supplier CSR performance, not just towards the CSR performance of the focal firm.
ContributorsRogers, Zachary S (Author) / Carter, Craig (Thesis advisor) / Dooley, Kevin (Committee member) / Singhal, Vinod (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description随着国外企业社会责任思潮的涌入，中国企业整体社会责任履行得到了不断地提升，但在企业发展过程中，诸如产品质量问题、环境污染、劳资冲突等社会责任事件仍层出不穷。为了推动企业社会责任在中国的发展，中国政府和社会组织陆续出台多个纲要和文件推动了我国企业社会责任的建设。自党的十八大以来，中国国家领导人多次强调构建企业社会责任体系对于企业和社会长远发展的重要性。可以说，当下中国关于企业社会责任的探讨已经从“企业是否要履行”，转向“企业如何履行”以及“如何促进企业履行”。然而，中国上市公司履行社会责任的情况并不容乐观，根据“润灵环球”社会责任报告评级数据库显示，中国2018年披露社会责任信息的上市企业数量占比不足1/4，其中自愿披露的占比不到1/5，而从披露的质量来看，平均得分也仅为42分，较及格线还有较大的距离。针对这一研究背景，本文将媒体关注和制度环境二者同时考虑在内，构建一个系统的外部环境对企业社会责任履行影响的理论框架，并利用中国2009-2018年沪深两市A股上市企业作为研究样本，通过定量的方法考察了媒体关注和制度环境二者对企业社会责任的直接影响以及交互影响效果，实证结果显示，媒体关注和制度环境均能显著的促进企业社会责任水平，且制度环境在媒体关注和企业社会责任之间具有正向调节效应。这一结论在经过指标替换、考察内生性问题和分组回归等一系列稳健性检验后依旧成立。进一步研究结论发现，媒体关注和制度环境二者对企业社会责任的影响在不同的企业社会责任水平、不同的媒体报道类型以及不同性质企业中具有异质性。随着全媒体时代的到来和中国特色
制度背景下，本研究对如何从外部治理视角出发推进企业社会责任水平具有较强的政策启发。
ContributorsJi, Pengbin (Author) / Shao, Benjamin (Thesis advisor) / Shi, Weilei (Thesis advisor) / Jiang, Zhan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
How do firms differentiate themselves from others, and how do audiences respond to their distinctiveness? Optimal distinctiveness theory suggests that an intermediate level of distinctiveness in a single point or a balance in the level of distinctiveness across multiple points is most beneficial to a firm as it addresses both competition and conformity pressures. However, empirical studies have found positive, inverted U-shaped, and U-shaped relationships between distinctiveness and audience evaluation. Using CSR strategy as a research context, I develop a theory of two forms of distinctiveness—positioning distinctiveness and topic distinctiveness—and explore each form’s unique and interactive effect on audience evaluation. Building on cognitive categorization research, I argue that positioning distinctiveness, or the extent to which the pattern of resource allocation across an established set of strategic decisions differs from that of category prototypes, will have a positive relationship with subsequent audience evaluation. However, topic distinctiveness, or the extent to which a firm differentiates itself from others by introducing new practices to its category, will show an inverted U-shaped relationship with audience evaluation. I also examine how positioning distinctiveness moderates the effect of topic distinctiveness and predict that audiences will assess a firm’s topic distinctiveness more positively when a firm has a high level of positioning distinctiveness in its main topic domain. In addition, I investigate how strategic distinctiveness in business strategy and environmental-level factors moderate the effects of positioning and topic distinctiveness by influencing audiences’ demands for differentiation and conformity. Utilizing the sample of S&P 500 firms from 2001 to 2018, I empirically examine the hypothesized relationships. By analyzing annual CSR reports using state-of-the-art natural language programming and topic modeling techniques, I develop a novel measure of topic distinctiveness in CSR strategy. This dissertation contributes to the optimal distinctiveness literature by simultaneously examining multiple forms of distinctiveness and by unpacking the conditions under which demands for conformity and differentiation may vary.
ContributorsPark, Eunyoung (Author) / Lange, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Bundy, Jonathan (Committee member) / Semadeni, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022