Author: Annapurna Vancheswaran
and Vinayshil Gautam
Summary:
In any company, giving a high priority to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is no longer seen as an unproductive cost or resource burden. In fact, it is seen as a means to enhance reputation and credibility among stakeholders, something on which success or even survival may depend. There is a marked transformation in how CSR is being viewed not only among large companies but the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well. It is increasingly clear that there is indeed a business case for CSR as much in SMEs as in larger organizations. Most SMEs are ownership driven and hence have a personalised style of managing their enterprises. Unlike larger organizations that principally drive interrelationships among their stakeholders and value chain, the SMEs strive on these interrelationships. Their contribution to responsible behaviour is typically governed by systems within their supply chain and may vary as per the expectation and demands from time to time. Although there is no exact way to measure the benefits of CSR in economic terms, there is no doubt that CSR helps in bringing about improvements in the competitiveness of firms and in improving stakeholder relations. This paper is a study of the CSR practices of 30 small-size companies drawn from different sectors in India. The empirical analysis shows a high level of incidence of CSR in these SMEs, particularly on the factors that translate into marketing benefits. Thus, the practice of CSR is seen to both correlate and contribute to the marketing efforts of the SMEs. In other words, CSR is gaining importance as a marketing instrument and a key to performance improvement within an organization, may it be large, medium, or small.
