Assessing stakeholders’ perception on application of corporate social responsibility in Meta Abo Brewery Share Company

Abstract

In recent years, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gradually become a leading issue in business. Heightened corporate attention to CSR has not been entirely voluntary. Many companies awoke to it only after being surprised by public response to issues they had not previously thought were part of their responsibilities. But despite their intent, the practice and what drives them to engage is not lucid. Thus, the prime essence of this study was to assess the practice of CSR in Meta Abo Brewery S.C. The study used both qualitative and quantitative research approaches and it is mainly dependent on primary source of data in which three types of structured questionnaires were developed to get data from respondents composed of customers, community and employees while managers of the company were interviewed. To meet the research objective the researchers used different sampling techniques and procedures to select the samples from each stakeholder’s category. The findings depicts that the employees awareness towards concept of CSR is at its lowest level. The stakeholders' perceptions on components of CSR include economic, ethical, legal, and philanthropic responsibilities agreed that items listed are important aspects to business organizations socially responsible activities. The prioritization of CSR to the company includes philanthropic, next ethical, then economic and finally legal responsibilities. The company needs to allocate enough amount of budget and focus on training and developing mechanisms that help to communicate with the stakeholders.

Keywords: Corporate social Responsibility, Components of CSR, economic responsibility, ethical responsibility, legal responsibility, philanthropic responsibility, Stakeholders