CSR Practices among Indian and UK Retailers
| Following an in-depth qualitative research methodology; this research compared Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices among six major retailers, three from India and three from the United Kingdom; and tried to analyse and explain the differences that were observed. CSR practices were found to be more mature in the UK than in the Indian retail industry. UK firms tended to be more open and sensitive towards CSR, appeared to be more proficient in their stakeholder relations, exhibited higher CSR transparency and structured CSR more consistently. In contrast, CSR practices by Indian retailers were in a formative stage, characterized by being unstructured, informal and sometimes, inconsistent. For example, none of the studied Indian retailers released CSR reports and only one of the retailers had dedicated personnel to drive CSR activities. These observed differences could be explained by developmental differences between the UK and Indian retail industries. Our analysis revealed that UK retailers seemed to be more interested global issues, while the studied Indian retailers focused on local issues. Overall, in the UK there seemed to be greater consciousness and more CSR activities pertaining to environmental sustainability (reduction of energy consumption and waste management) as opposed to economic well being of any disadvantaged groups, though all the companies studied had "support for communities" as one of the several objectives of their CSR initiatives. The CSR activities that we witnessed among the Indian retailers were focused more on inclusivity rather than on environmental management. This situation can be explained by the fact that environmental regulation is more prevalent in the UK than in India. This confirms observation in extant literature which suggests that CSR programmes tended to be heavily influenced by socio-economic priorities of different countries, which tend to be global issues in developed countries and the need for health care, infrastructure and education in developing countries (Blowfield and Frynas 2005; Frynas 2006). |
Project Team
Sourav Mukherji and Kunal Basu (SAID Business School)
Sponsor
Oxford Centre Corporate Responsibility
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Ongoing Projects
Project Status
Ongoing (Initiated in 2010-2012)
Funded Projects Functional Area
Organizational Behavior & Human Resources Management
CSR Practices among Indian and UK Retailers
| Project Team: | Sourav Mukherji and Kunal Basu (SAID Business School) | |
| Sponsor: | Oxford Centre Corporate Responsibility | |
| Project Status: | Ongoing (Initiated in 2010-2012) | |
| Area: | Organizational Behavior & Human Resources Management | |
| Abstract: |
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