消费者视角下企业社会责任缺失研究综述

A Review on Corporate Social Irresponsibility:A Consumer Perspective

近年来关于企业社会责任缺失(corporate social irresponsibility,CSI)的研究逐年增多。文章通过布尔逻辑检索①,主要选取同行评审的学术期刊,对国内外CSI相关文献进行检索,从消费者视角梳理了现有CSI研究的理论基础、研究方法、CSI的影响结果、作用机制及边界条件。以往研究表明学者们多以归因理论、社会认同理论为基础,运用二手数据法、实验法、调查法及混合研究方法 (如结合定性访谈及调查法)开展CSI研究;学者们较少探讨CSI成因中消费者的作用,道德情感是消费者响应CSI的主要作用过程;消费者个体特征在调节CSI与消费者响应的关系间具有重要作用。未来CSI研究可整合道德决策模型构建消费者响应CSI的理论框架,分析消费者在CSI发生中扮演的角色,丰富CSI研究理论视角及研究方法。

Researchers have reviewed corporate social irresponsibility( CSI) research from an organizational level,but there is no published literature review of CSI from a consumer perspective to our current knowledge. Furthermore,existing literature review papers have mainly focused on the definitions of CSI,failing to give a systematical review on the consumer-related antecedents,outcomes,mechanisms,and boundaries for the impact of CSI on consumer responses. Consumers play an important role in defining CSI and pay increasing attention to ethical factors for the products or services in their purchase process. This study aims to review existing CSI research from a consumer perspective to increase the comprehensiveness of the existing CSI review research and to highlight the role of consumers in current CSI research at a deeper level.We focus on peer-reviewed academic journal articles,using Corporate Social Irresponsibility,Corporate Wrongdoing,Corporate Illegality,Corporate Misconduct,Financial Fraud to search articles in English through those databases,such as Web of Science and Scopus. We also used "企业社会责任缺失""企业不负责任""企业社会责任失范""企业社会失责"to search articles in Chinese through the China National Knowledge Infrastructure( cnki. net). We obtained 194 English articles after a rigorous literature screening process. We coded the articles and selected 59 English articles and 17 Chinese articles studying CSI from a consumer perspective to conduct further analysis.We have five aspects of findings based on the review of current CSI research from a consumer perspective. First,attribution theory and social identity theory are frequently used as theoretical foundations. Researchers use secondary data,experiments,surveys,and mixed methods approaches to study CSI. Industries or products used in the experiments or the surveys are closely related to the consumers’ daily lives. The participants are mainly from North America,Europe and Oceania. Second,research on the antecedents of CSI from a consumer level is limited. The only research has investigated the impacts of information valence and consumer corporate social responsibility expectations on perceived CSI. It is needy to pay attention to the role of consumer responsibility in CSI research. Third,researchers have studied consumer perceptional( e. g.,perceived corporate image,reputation,or ethicality),emotional( e. g.,moral outrage),attitudinal and behavioral( e. g.,blame,complaint,punishment,boycott,or protest) responses to CSI. Among the responses,negative word-of-mouth is the most concerned outcomes of CSI,followed by consumer perceptions and attitudes towards brands and companies,and consumer boycotts and protests. Currently empirical CSI research from a consumer perspective has reached consensus that CSI leads to negative consumer responses. Fourth,existing research has investigated the mediated effects of consumer psychological variables( e. g.,contempt,anger,disgust,etc.) and external variables related to corporates and brands( e. g.,corporate ethics,brand personality,etc.),revealing the stable mediate role of negative moral emotions.Fifth,researchers have found the moderated effects of individual characteristics( e. g.,moral quality,self-concept,etc.),corporate characteristics( e. g.,corporate/industry predisposition,etc.),CSI events,and country-level factors.Our work contributes to the CSI research by reviewing the definitions,classifications,and outcomes of CSI,the theoretical foundations and methods of current CSI research,as well as the mechanisms and boundary conditions for the influences of CSI on consumer responses from a consumer perspective and providing potential directions for future research.Hence,future studies can extend CSI research from a consumer perspective through the following aspects. First,exploring the antecedent effects of consumer culpability and socially responsible consumption awareness on consumer CSI perception. Second,enriching the theoretical perspective of CSI research based on the ethical decision-making model and event system theory. Specifically,future research can integrate conceptual frameworks for consumer responses to CSI based on the ethical decision-making model by understanding the environmental factors of CSI events,identifying the social norms being violated,and considering consumers’ rational and non-rational( intuitional and emotional) reasoning process when processing CSI issues. Moreover,future research can conduct CSI event analysis by considering the novelty,disruption,and criticality of CSI events according to the event system theory.Third,since CSI usually leads to negative consumer responses,it is difficult to obtain data from business leaders,which limits the development of CSI research. The development of social media has generated volumes of user-generated content. Thus,future research can conduct CSI research by using web crawler techniques to obtain user-generated content related to CSI events,and using latent dirichlet allocation and sentiment analysis instruments to perform the content analysis. Fourth,investigating the mediating roles of moral reasoning and positive emotions in explaining how CSI influences consumer responses. Furthermore,exploring the moderating roles of CSI event characteristics and consumer moral capabilities to extend research on the boundary conditions for the impacts of CSI on consumer responses.