Changing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in China : A Case Study of Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) in China

Abstract: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and multinational companies (MNCs) landed in Chinaalmost at the same time. However, the Chinese market where the governmental role is alwaysinfluential provides a specific setting for the CSR development in China. The purpose of thisthesis is to analyze the governmental role in the CSR engagement of SvenskaKullagerfabriken (SKF) in China based on a literature review, qualitative case study, semistructuredinterview and three mini-cases study. By adopting these methods, it is found thatthe Chinese government is trying to provide a more CSR-friendly policy and stricterlegislation in order to guide the Chinese business towards a sustainable direction. Besides, inrecent years, the Chinese government is also re-orienting the social values that are claimingthe return of the traditional business ethics and promoting the level of CSR in the Chinesesociety. A triangulated model is developed in this thesis to analyze the case company. Theexperience of SKF indicates that the company’s CSR strategy is universal, whereas its CSRengagement has changed along with the Chinese development. It is found that there are fourphases of SKF’s CSR development in China, and each phase is associated with andstimulated by the specific scheme during the Chinese social and economic development.Among the variables in Chinese changing society, the macro-policy is deemed by SKF as thekey factor that has the largest impact on the CSR engagement of the company. After thisresearch, the research gap will be filled in with an empirical case. Yet, the future efforts inempirically investigating more companies are suggested to enrich the research on thecorrelation between the Chinese government, CSR development and MNCs in China.