Corporate Social Responsibility in Froosh: How Perception Gaps Complicate the Achievement of Successful CSR-Initiatives and Stakeholder Relations

Abstract

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has existed for many decades and is build on the assumption that businesses have some kind of social responsibility towards society that goes beyond their economic and legal responsibilities. As the stakeholder demand for social accountability is continuously building up, the amount of effort that companies has to put into CSR increases as well. Ensuring clear CSR-communication and effective implementation of CSR- practices has thus become of vital importance to most companies today. Some businesses do however struggle to fulfill their stakeholder expectations with their available ressources and ultimately end up making promises they cannot meet. In this thesis, a small Scandinavian smoothie company will be used to illustrate how this phenomena is occurring in practice. Through the means of semi-structured interviews and a survey, this thesis analyses how Froosh’s own perception of their CSR-communication and CSR in general is remarkably different from the stakeholder perception. The findings suggest that while Froosh believes that they are creating actual sustainable development through their CSR-efforts, while also being actively involved with all of their primary stakeholders, in fact only one stakeholder group is included in co-constructing Froosh’s CSR-efforts and CSR-communication. A major gap thus exist between Froosh’s proclaimed CSR and their actual CSR-efforts, which suggests that Froosh not only fail to live up to the stakeholder expectations, but furthermore have a very unrealistic approach to doing sustainable business in developing countries. In the light of these findings, Froosh can therefore be characterized as hypocritical. Even though multiple degrees of hypocrisy exist, none can accurately describe the hypocrisy in Froosh. This thesis thus contributes to the existing literature by suggesting an additional dimension on corporate hypocrisy.