ANALYSE EXPLORATOIRE DE LA MISE EN ŒUVRE DES TROIS DIMENSIONS DE LA RSE DANS LES PME FRANÇAISES

Abstract

The implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has become a topic of significant interest to many researchers. But this issue remains to be explored further, as researchers disagree about the capacity of SMEs to adopt a triple CSR perspective, which embraces economic,social, and environmental realms, not to mention their capacity to engage in each of these three aspects. Understanding the adoption of the economic,social, and environmental responsibilities in the SME context is an issue to be further investigated and the influence of such factors as size and sector tangibility remain to be clarified. Our theoretical framework is based on the “balanced concept of the firm”, developed by Enderle (Enderle and Tavis, 1998; Enderle, 2004), that considers from a theoretical viewpoint the economic, social, and environmental aspects in a balanced way. Our empiricalstudy is based on a quantitative study of 155 French SMEs.Data analysisshowsthat the environmental aspect is a discriminating criterion in explaining the simultaneous implementation of the three CSR dimensions and enables us, via a clustering analysis, to propose a typology for CSR practices in French SMEs.