Corporate Citizenship: A Stakeholder Approach for Defining Corporate Social Performance and Identifying Measures for Assessing It

A common set of corporate social performance (CSP) measures is needed by both academic researchers and businesses that want to assess corporate social impacts. Company officials striving to be socially responsible say they value formal assessments as an essential step in achieving their social goals. In reality, however, few companies currently make the effort to conduct an evaluation of their social impacts on stakeholders. A prime reason for this lack of social assessment has been the paucity of agreement over the measurement tools and methodology for doing so. Academics have also had difficulties measuring CSP because of insuf ficient agreement about CSP as a theoretical construct. Without accepted definitions of corporate social responsibility and corporate social per formance, researchers lack a foundation for the work of systematically gathering, organizing, and analyzing corporate data (Clarkson, 1995). Another problem plaguing CSP research is the lack of consistent meas ures. Carroll (1991) described the variety of measures as “swirling waters of CSP measurement.”