The challenges of corporate social responsibility assessment methodologies

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has garnered significant interest for several years as Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), companies and scientific authors are involved in its promotion. Numerous methodologies have been developed in order to assess the business CSR, affecting the stakeholders’ attitude. The aim of this paper is to categorize the main challenges of ten methodologies that assess CSR. The selection of assessment methodologies was based on two criteria: their adoption by Social Responsible Investments Indexes (SRI indexes) and the assessment of multiple CSR dimensions. The most comprehensive methodologies are those that are adopted by Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, Ethibel Sustainability Index, KLD and Advanced Sustainable Performance Indices. Totally, nine assessment challenges are mentioned, some of which are: unspecific CSR criteria for each sector, unaccepted weight rate for each dimension or criterion, lack of transparency and ignorance of the main dimensions of society. The value of this paper is to prompt the CSR methodologies to advance their procedure, taking into account the proposed challenges in order to assess social responsibility in a complete approach.