Corporate social responsibility as managerial innovation in the forest industry: Adoption and consequences

Abstract

The aim of this quantitative thesis is to discover how the CSR practices have diffused among the forest industry companies globally and find out which motives or expected consequences are important for each adopter group. The attitude towards investing on the environmental performance within the early adopters is studied. The empirical part of the thesis is based on the questionnaire for 60 Forest Industry companies and the statistical analysis was performed. The results show that environmentally oriented CSR practices have diffused more widely than the socially oriented. The innovativeness in terms of earliness of adoption of CSR is not strongly affected by the location or the size of the company. Motives for the adoption of CSR practices and the attitude towards investing in improving of environmental performance vary between adopter categories. Early adopters and laggards have different motives and attitudes than other adopter groups.