THE THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF THE LINKS BETWEEN CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND NATIONAL CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
THE THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF THE LINKS BETWEEN CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND NATIONAL CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

Summary/Abstract: This article seeks to reveal theoretical links between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and national cultural environment. The article analyses and summarises most common theoretical approaches in academic literature to CSR and its development. This allows us to distinguish the main CSR aspects and relevant CSR issues. One can state that CSR approaches that are focused only on shareholders needs are becoming less common in academic literature. CSR is increasingly being evaluated in a broader context, attributing to this phenomenon not only economic, but also other relevant social and environmental issues. This allows to expand the field of academic research and to evaluate CSR in the context of various phenomena. The phenomenon of cultural environment has been developing for a relatively long period of time and has very deep roots in the history of nations as well as the consciousness of people. As a result, its impact on the formation of the approach of the society to values and social responsibility needs to be taken into account. In this article national cultural environment is defined and evaluated according to the methodology created and developed by Hofstede. Even though only partial research prevails in the academic literature, and research results as well as opinions of scholars are ambiguous, the analysis of links among national culture, its individual dimensions such as individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and CSR aspects allows us to predict some trends. The results show that CSR is defined and perceived differently in countries of different culture, and expectations from social responsibility vary too. Different levels of attention is given to solving economic, social and environmental problems in different cultural environments, and different countries do not always focus on the same CSR issues. Consequently, different features of CSR are dominant in different countries.

• Details
• Contents