Science Research Management

Science Research Management ›› 2021, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (5): 143-152.

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Does social trust help enterprises fulfill their social responsibilities?

Yang Zhen1,2, Ling Hongcheng3, Chen Jin1,2   

  1. 1. School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; 
    2. Research Center for Technological Innovation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; 
    3. Industrial Economy Research Institute, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang 330013, Jiangxi, China
  • Received:2020-03-03 Revised:2020-09-09 Online:2021-05-20 Published:2021-05-19

Abstract:     The evolution process of corporate social responsibility has been nearly 100 years. It has gradually evolved from the necessity and legitimacy of social responsibility behavior whether or not to perform social responsibility to the rationality and social desirability of how to perform social responsibility better and sustainably, the concept of corporate social responsibility has also changed from the concept of moral charity based on businessmen, the concept of social response based on the pressure of stakeholders to the concept of tool competition based on strategic competition and the concept of social responsibility based on platform value co creation and sharing. In this sense, how to better drive enterprises to fulfill social responsibility and more sustainable performance of social responsibility has become a major practical topic of concern and research in academia and industry. From the existing research, although there are multiple perspectives to drive corporate social responsibility, including "from the outside to the inside" external institutional drive and external stakeholders drive, as well as "from the inside out" internal entrepreneurship and managers′ social responsibility cognition to drive corporate social responsibility. 
    However, from the perspective of institution theory, studies have neglected that informal institutional environment, as a "lubricant" in macroeconomic operation and micro enterprise market and social activities, plays an irreplaceable role in regulating enterprise market and social behavior. Although the existing research has focused on the important role of social trust in the market-oriented economic behaviors, such as financing constraints, risk-taking, M&A performance and enterprise innovation, there is a lack of attention on the corporate social responsibility behavior in the sense of corporate social attributes. 
    Based on A-share listed companies in China from 2009 to 2017, this paper empirically examines the impact of social trust on corporate social responsibility, and examines the regulatory effects of external formal system and internal executive incentive institution on social trust (informal system) and corporate social responsibility, and further verifies the corporate social responsibility under the guidance of tool competition logic in society the instrumental value effect between trust and enterprise innovation.
    The results show that: (1) social trust has a significant positive impact on corporate social responsibility. Heterogeneity analysis shows that there are heterogeneity in property rights, disclosure environment and industry follow-up; (2) The external formal system (market-oriented environment) has a positive regulatory role between social trust and corporate social responsibility, showing a synergistic multiplier effect of formal system and informal system on corporate social responsibility; (3) The equity incentive system of executives in enterprises has a negative regulatory role between social trust and corporate social responsibility, showing the substitution effect of incentive system in enterprises and informal system outside enterprises on corporate social responsibility; (4) corporate social responsibility has a partial intermediary role between social trust and corporate innovation, that is, corporate social responsibility proposed by Porter and Kramer (2006). The effect of strategic competition tools is supported by empirical results. 
    This paper finds that the informal institutional environment plays an important role in driving corporate social responsibility, and confirms that the formal institutional environment and the internal incentive institutional environment play an important moderating role between the informal institutional environment and corporate social responsibility, and reveals that social trust is not only a "lubricant" of enterprise market behavior, but also a kind of "lubricant" to standard, incentive and governance corporate social responsibility, which is conducive to the formation of value reciprocal network relationship between enterprises and external stakeholders, and then drives the "moral orientation" and "social self-discipline" of enterprises. 
    Therefore, this paper enriches the research on the driving factors of corporate social responsibility at the theoretical level, especially bridging the shortcomings of the traditional "from outside to inside" external system driven and external stakeholders driven, as well as the "inside out" internal entrepreneurship and managers′ social responsibility awareness drive, and finally verifies the corporate social responsibility as a strategy competition tools can help enterprises obtain innovation resources and promote their innovation performance.

Key words:  social trust, corporate social responsibility (CSR), formal system, informal system, executive incentive, corporate innovation