Corporate social responsibility information transparency and business performance: Evidence from Spanish organic olive oil companies

The authors who call for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) argue that the company’s concern to assume its social and environmental responsibilities as well as its financial ones will strengthen its market position and generate greater profits. In this strengthening of the business or generation of a source of competitive advantage, CSR communication plays a key role as a means to enable the various stakeholders to take decisions that affect the company in a rational manner. Of all the various communication channels, the Internet is gaining increasing prominence as a key tool for communicating CSR. It has become a strategic component of communication insofar as it brings internal and external benefits to the organization, including an enhanced reputation. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to analyse the level of CSR information transparency on the websites of Spanish organic olive oil producing companies (their e-CSR transparency) and whether this influences their business performance. It examines both the type of information on CSR that these companies provide on their websites, measuring their CSR information transparency by means of an index of website information transparency, and whether their website transparency has an influence on their business performance, identifying the company characteristics and social responsibility dimensions that exert the greatest influence. Multivariate statistical methods were used to discover whether the level of information transparency was related to organizational and economic variables. The results corroborate the hypothesis of a relation of dependence between the level of transparency and organizational and economic variables. This relation is one of positive influence between e-CSR transparency and business performance, in spite of the limited use these companies make of the internet to showcase their CSR practices.