The relationships between companies’ stakeholder pressures and CSR implementations have been extensively studied in recent years. The literature on CSR to date has generated important insights into different and distinctive enterprises’ stakeholder pressures that are influenced by corporate decisions and influence CSR practices. For instance, Berman, et.al. (1999) and Henriques & Sadorsky (1999) have suggested that firms face pressures from four major stakeholder groups: community stakeholders, regulatory stakeholders (governments and legislatures), organizational stakeholders, and media. More recently, Kassinis and Vafeas (2006) have empirically shown that varying stakeholder characteristics and the dependencies associated with them are related to varying levels of the organization’s environmental engagement as well as environmental performance. However, Marquis & Qian (2014) showed that listed firms’ responses to stakeholders’ pressures have decoupling risk by adopting symbolic rather than substantive actions, because the ownership of the enterprises or background of CEO.
Despite these findings, the relationship between stakeholder pressures and different dimensions of CSR is not consistent under different theoretical perspectives (Klassen & Whybark, 1999; Majumdar & Marcus, 2001; Tang, et al., 2015; Marquis & Qian, 2014). Different stakeholder groups inherently have different levels of resources and expectations, and thus they may affect corporate CSR engagement in the business practices. Meanwhile, corporations in different countries and different industries might interpret and implement CSR in different ways, due to varying cultural and institutional characteristics. What is more, most of the existent discussions about the influences of different stakeholder groups on CSR are made under the context of developed economies or with large, listed firms, and the CSR of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and/or those on emerging markets are still underexplored…
