Corporate Reputation and Corporate Social Responsibility

The increasing importance of both Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation has, in recent years, been recognised within the strategic management literature by a proliferation of conceptual and empirical work. The literature has paid particular attention to the relationships between one or other of CSR and reputation and such phenomena as corporate financial performance (Griffin and Mahon, 1997; Roberts and Dowling, 2002; Waddock and Graves, 1997), consumer perceptions of product quality (Milgrom and Roberts, 1986; Sen and Bhattacharya, 2001), employee morale, productivity, recruitment and retention (Moskowitz, 1972; Turban and Cable, 2003; Turban and Greening, 1996), company ownership characteristics (Johnson and Greening, 1999), and access to capital (Cochran and Wood, 1984; Hart, 1995). In spite of this burgeoning interest in both CSR and corporate reputation, there has been relatively little research of potential links between the two. However, in this chapter we will provide an overview of some notable contributions to our understanding of the nature and importance of this relationship.