Conceptualising, Theorising, and Assessing the CSR Contributions of British Companies to Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The transition to a moral economy inferred by CSR 4.0 requires a radical change to incentivise businesses to move away from business-case corporate social responsibility (CSR). Despite this, the pitfalls in the fundamentals of CSR remain to be solved. These consist of the definitional, measurement and theoretical problem. This thesis remedies these problems in the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic. In Western capitalist democracies, the pandemic was underpinned by an unprecedented level of consumer skepticism of firm motives. So, did companies respond by engaging more or less in CSR disclosures and were they of a higher quality? Accordingly, this thesis explores the relationship between CSR and authenticity. By synthesising the literature, a definition and framework derived from Al-Ghazali’s understanding of truthfulness is developed. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by the conceptualisation of a new iteration of authenticity – “Genuinity”.
Genuinity is a concept that focuses on consumer perception of a firm’s CSR motives at the presupposition level – in other words, a variant of dispositional skepticism. It places emphasis on treating firm motives on a continuum between “self-serving” and “for society”. By drawing on Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah (social cohesion) theory, individual perceptions can be collated to represent society’s collective perception. Genuinity data is collected from a questionnaire which received 200 individual responses. Moreso, genuinity is integrating as a moderating variable into the two well-studied empirical relationships of CSR –corporate financial performance (CFP) and –firm risk (FR) across four years of the pandemic (2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022).
Using a three staged quantitative methodology and a sample of 89 LSE firms (or 356 firm-year observations), the results show that CSR has a negative and positive impact on CFP and FR respectively. It also finds that genuinity weakens these empirical relationships. This has significant implications for corporate and academic mindset which is necessary for implementing “business for purpose” models underpinned by CSR 4.0.

Date of Award	28 Nov 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Aly Salama (Supervisor), Gloria Botchway (Supervisor) & Ahmed Sarhan (Supervisor)