Companies Interpretation of CSR and its Growing Reporting Requirements

Working with sustainability is becoming more and more important for companies, since thedemands in this area are constantly increasing. To communicate this work through reports, isbecoming a mandatory activity that companies are expected to do. The existing research withinthe area of CSR is broad and much is happening in a short time, which makes this an area thatalways has the need for further investigation. Therefore, it is of interest to explore how thecompanies are viewing the concept CSR and their thoughts about this more including proposal.The purpose of this study is to investigate how SMEs today interpret the concept CSR. Further,this study will consider how SMEs communicate their CSR work and their view on the new EUdirective, regarding the CSR reporting, its impact and necessity.To give an understanding of the concept CSR, its definition and what it can mean for companies,are presented by previous research. Also, how CSR work can be communicated. This study hasconducted semi-structured interviews with six different companies to be able to get a picture ofhow companies today view the concept of CSR, sustainability, and its reporting requirements.The findings show that companies work with several perspectives on sustainability to meet theirstakeholders’ requirements. Also, the perspectives are prioritized in different orders.Conclusions are drawn that CSR is not a widespread concept in Sweden. The term sustainabilityis more commonly used. The overall view of sustainability is to give back to the society in oneway or another. It was raised several times during the interviews that it often could be hard tovisualize the social sustainability. Which contribute to an interesting part to further researchhow this could be made.It is also stated that companies always want to do more, but the majority of companies miss theresources, people, and competence for this. This opens the question of how this competencegap can be minimized. The respondents turned out to have different thoughts about if the newEU directive regarding CSR reporting is necessary or not. 50% was not even aware of thedirective, but all agreed that it is of importance to report their CSR work