What Defines CSR Reports

The existing contents of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports are highly diversified. This paper presents an attempt to find the most common characteristics of CSR reports in an objective way. Specifically, through the machine reading of CSR reports written in Chinese and released by 1191 organizations between 2008 and 2012, as well as expert screening, we found 359 keywords that can be considered to reflect the common meaning of CSR reports. These keywords are classified into six categories: economic development, environmental issues, employment practices, consumers and clients, community, and Chinese characteristics. To use a metaphor concerning the key elements in carbohydrates, these six categories are like the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen components of CSR reports. The frequencies of these keywords can be used to identify the proportions of these six categories of information in a CSR report. The economic and environmental aspects of CSR are mentioned most often (on average, 30.17% and 28.08%...