Corporate Social Responsibility

Many companies, policymakers, and researchers have come to agree on the necessity of promoting efforts to move economies towards more sustainability. However, its implementation remains challenging, as it requires new ways of conducting business, including the systematic integration of social, environmental, and ethical concerns into business operations.

The Institute of Sustainable Business, in collaboration with VU Amsterdam and the University of Oxford, is undertaking a qualitative study funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) to examine CSR implementation in the Swiss banking and insurance industries.

Approach

Our longitudinal research project includes three rounds of interviews (approx. 130 in total) with representatives of companies and their stakeholders, as well as documents about specific CSR projects and publicly available data on firms’ CSR implementation.

Aims

The SNF project aims to develop new approaches to promote CSR in the Swiss banking and insurance industries and to help companies integrate ESG and CSR principles into their decision-making.

Initial results of the study show:

• Most companies have integrated CSR in such a way that it no longer takes place in isolation in individual departments, but is spread across many departments. This means that CSR is increasingly being integrated into central business processes.
• Sustainability products such as sustainable funds and sustainability criteria for lending are becoming increasingly important in the Swiss financial sector.
• Impact measurements in the ESG area are becoming ever more important, as companies and investors increasingly want to quantify the actual impact of their activities on the environment and society.

These findings point to a paradigm shift in which CSR is becoming an integral part of corporate management and strategy rather than a peripheral activity.