Strategic Focus of CSR towards Sustainability: A Sri Lankan Perspective

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) being one of the fastest changing areas of management today has few facets among scholars in the world, one school of thoughts believe CSR should be used mainly as a social endeavor and the others think it should be linked to the corporate strategy for financial performance. In this context, this paper aims to observe how strategic approach of CSR initiatives leads to sustainability specially an environment where economic wounds are been settling and new opportunities are been evolving after a 30 year long civil unrest in a society. The strategic antecedents recognized in this model are resource mobilization, market development and customer orientation and the study attempts to identify the core strategic focus of those in building CSR initiatives for sustainability. Accordingly, total of 360 shareholders/investors and managers among 40 corporates who were involved in CSR activities during 05 years after a long civil war in Sri Lanka was sampled. It has found that implementing CSR initiatives strategically aiming both resource mobilization and market development tend to support sustainability of those initiatives but aiming customer orientation has less impact otherwise. In conclusion, it is advisable for corporates to approach CSR initiatives strategically gaining a return to both the society and for them and also it is important that governments too support those initiatives in rebuilding process.

Keywords: strategic CSR, sustainability, rebuilding, resource mobilization and market development.