Corporate social responsibility under Covid-19 circumstancies: bulgarian business attitude

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is a topic of many research papers in which a consensus has been reached in terms of priorities for development of companies, society and households. In situation of the Covid-19 pandemic the CSR policies applied by the companies acquire a new content. Volunteering, helping victims of the disease, providing scarce medical supplies are just some of examples of initiatives for which there is evidence from all around the world. Nevertheless, CSR has its own clear philosophy and politically accepted understanding. In different countries have been adopted national strategies for corporate social responsibility with well defined goals and priorities. On 25th of November in 2009 the Council of Ministers of Republic of Bulgaria adopted the first 5-year national strategy for CSR (www.csr.bg). A few months before the appearance of the first Covid-19 cases in China, the Bulgarian government adopted a third 5-year CSR strategy. During the pandemic, despite of the otherwise wellformulated eight key areas for implementation of the strategy, many good practices of corporate action in the context of CSR have been identified. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a survey among benchmark Bulgarian companies regarding the reaction during the pandemic waves towards the staff and also the customers, the business partners and the society as a whole. In the sample are included SMEs with staff up to 250 people, large companies with more than 250 employees and key institutions in the banking, insurance and energy sectors which manage assets exceeding 10% of Bulgaria's GDP. Relatively small companies in the tourism sector are also included. Indeed the enterprises from the HoReCa sector suffer the most from the Covid-19 pandemic due to the measures and its temporary lockdown. The results of the study clearly show that in conditions of Covid-19 the desire to support the philosophy of CSR is highly reduced by the challenge in front of business to survive, especially of SMEs, but is widely supported by large companies with a benchmark influence for the Bulgarian economy. Attention is also paid to the environmental aspects in the application of CSR by the surveyed companies, as a key component of the concept. The individual answers are visualized through figures and tables. A 5-point Likert scale has been used with five meanings, reflecting neutrality, moderate agreement / disagreement and strong agreement / disagreement with the formulated statement.