Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives of MSME: A Study of Selected Units

The corporate social responsibility emerged as a business management concept in 1930. Since then, social responsibility is a popular topic of investigation for practitioners and academics from all the disciplines and has continued to be the focus of business operations. Corporate social responsibility is one of the important aspects of civilized society in which every individual is continuously receiving different experiences from the society. It is our responsibility to give back to the society, which has given us a priceless treasure throughout our life. Corporate social responsibility is the important role of every industry, no matter how big or small it is, as industry is a group of people working for some common cause. Comparatively less attention is being given to CSR in relation to SME’s in recent years. The knowledge of social activities in this sector, particularly in Kurukshetra has remained unexplored and amorphous. This paper examines how small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) understand and implement corporate social responsibility (CSR). Eight depth interviews with practitioners from SMEs were conducted. The most salient stakeholder groups for SMEs in are employees, customers and community members. The findings suggest that practitioners understand CSR in terms of stakeholder engagement. The findings also suggest that SMEs use different tools to communicate CSR-related messages to different stakeholder groups. The effective policy with employees is one-to-one communication and an open door policy. While the direct corporate involvement in community initiatives is an appropriate policy for societal stakeholders. The finding of the paper suggest for the development of corporate branding strategies in the SME sector