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Top1. Introduction
Corporate social responsibility (hereafter, CSR) has become a permanent item on the agenda of companies around the world, and the debate regarding motivations and implications of CSR practices goes beyond academia, affecting institutions and mass media1. The impact of CSR on the environment, stakeholders and society can have various advantages for companies, such as the consolidation of a positive brand image in the mind of consumers, an improvement in relations with institutions, and an increase in employee motivation.
However, the impact of CSR is unlikely if it is not communicated successfully: “for the public perception [of a firm’s] practiced social responsibility, what counts is not only what the firm does, since stakeholders would rarely know about that, but what the firm communicates that it does” (Ettinger et al., 2018, p. 95). Only effective communication enables companies to reap the benefits of CSR: “business cannot hope to enjoy concrete benefits from CSR unless they intelligently communicate about their initiatives to relevant stakeholders” (Maignan & Ferrell, 2004, p. 17).
Companies have various means to inform stakeholders about their involvement in CSR, such as advertising, product labels, media relations, CSR reports and websites, and the Internet is probably the most suitable “channel” given its unlimited capacity, global reach, flexibility and speed. Although the Internet has some downsides, for example the risk of information overload and the difficulty in controlling the use of online information (Debreceny et al., 2002; Xiao et al., 2004), it remains a powerful medium to highlight the companies’ commitment in CSR (Isenmann, 2006).
Company websites are excellent channels for representing CSR efforts (Morsing & Schultz, 2006). In fact, corporate websites address a wide audience, and their content is not affected by government regulations (Maignan & Ralston, 2002). Today, corporate websites have become effective communication channels to disclose the corporate social and environmental performance, and often have sections devoted to CSR (Du & Viera, 2012).
Various theoretical and empirical studies have analysed how large firms use their websites to communicate CSR (for example, Gomez & Chalmeta, 2011; Tang et al., 2015; Hetze & Winistorfer, 2016; Atli et al., 2018; Dikeocha, 2020). Recently, the interest of academics in the online CSR communication of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has grown. This is because SMEs make up the majority of companies around the world. Across the OECD, SMEs account for 99% of all businesses and between 50% and 60% of value added (OECD, 2019). Secondly, large and small firms differ considerably in terms of structure and organization (Tilley, 2000; Perrini, 2006; Fassin, 2008; Pedersen, 2009), and this difference can affect the motivation of CSR activities. Finally, in the past SMEs found it difficult to communicate their responsible practices in terms of sustainability. With the rapid development of online technologies, they have a low-cost solution for informing stakeholders about their CSR engagement (Dincer & Dincer, 2010). In other words, SMEs enjoy a “relative advantage”, compared to large firms, in communicating their “good practices” online, because they can exploit the characteristics of the Internet (capacity, reach, flexibility and speed) at the same cost.
However, the empirical results regarding how SMEs inform about their CSR practices can be affected by the methodology adopted to select the companies to be examined. In addition, the empirical research of CSR in SMEs has been primarily qualitative, which requires small or “special” samples. Although a small sample enables the CSR communication to be described in detail, revealing “how” small and large companies implement CSR, it cannot assess “how widespread” CSR is among SMEs. This paper studies the possible determinants of CSR in SMEs using a sample that differs from those used in previous studies on the theme, and considers the communication of responsible behaviour in the corporate websites of 1054 Italian SMEs. The paper analyses the relationship between so-called controversial industries and the corporate communication of CSR in SMEs. In fact, previous research has suggested that the firms belonging to controversial industries have a higher probability of being engaged in CSR practices (for example, Grougiou et al., 2016 and Vollero et al., 2019). However, empirical work has confirmed this prediction only for large firms which, given their high visibility, recognize the urgency of informing stakeholders about their social and environmental initiatives.