Stakeholders’ Influence on Corporate Social Responsibility in Swedish Multinational Corporations

Abstract: Background and Problem: We found that the stakeholders’ impact on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Swedish Multinational Corporations (MNCs) was an unexplored area of research. In today’s global environment MNCs must consider the stakeholder pressures from different markets worldwide when performing their CSR work. The complexity in defining both MNC and CSR contributes to the problem in identifying what stakeholders a MNC should prioritize. To narrow down the amount of aspects that should be considered by a MNC, we have chosen only to look at the stakeholder influence on Swedish MNCs. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of how Swedish MNCs are affected by their stakeholders, and which stakeholders they consider the most important when working with CSR on the international market. Method: We have used an abductive research approach and collected the empirical findings through qualitative interviews with four case companies. Additionally, the empirical findings were analyzed with the theoretical framework taken into consideration to find linkages and relationships in the answers. Results and conclusion: We found that the majority of the respondents from the Swedish MNCs mentioned customers, investors and employees as the most important stakeholders to their CSR work. Furthermore, different stakeholders affected them in various ways and we discovered that some areas within CSR had more or less importance depending on which market was taken into consideration and thus diverse stakeholders were the influent. Conclusively, customers seemed to be the core stakeholder affecting all external as well as internal stakeholders, on both the global and the local markets.