全球视野 | 过去正面的CSR评级为什么反而会导致企业慈善捐赠的下降？

Everywhere you look, something or someone is being rated—that movie you're thinking of seeing, the restaurant you might try, the president's popularity this week. We don't seem to agree on much right now, but we can all agree that a positive rating is good, and a negative rating is bad. Or can we? 

无论你往哪里看，都会有人或事被打分——你想看的那部电影，你可能会去的餐厅，以及总统本周的受欢迎程度。我们现在似乎没有什么共识，但我们都可以同意，正面的评价是好的，负面的评价是坏的。或者说，我们真的可以这么认为吗？ 

New research from two Brigham Young University professors suggests that when it comes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings, if what's being measured doesn't match society's values, the company may be unhappy to receive a positive rating. Using a sample of 379 firms from the 1990s, when CSR ratings were new and business philanthropy more controversial, they found that companies decreased charitable giving by about 25% immediately after receiving high marks for philanthropy from KLD Research & Analytics. 

杨百翰大学两位教授的新研究表明，当涉及到企业社会责任（CSR）评级时，如果被衡量的东西不符合社会的价值观，公司可能会对获得正面评级感到不满。他们使用了20世纪90年代的379家企业的样本。在当时企业社会责任评级是新的，而商业慈善事业更是有争议的。两位教授发现，公司在获得了来自KLD研究与分析公司的慈善事业高分后，立即减少了约25%的慈善捐赠。 

"Ratings are always situated within a larger social context," said Ben Lewis, who along with co-author Chad Carlos combed through years of printed financial reports from the 90s for the study. "We need to account for whether or not what's being ranked is valued by society at large, because if not, ratings may have unintended consequences." 

本·刘易斯和合著者查德·卡洛斯为了这项研究，梳理了20世纪90年代以来打印的多年财务报告。本·刘易斯说：“评级总是处于一个更大的社会背景中。我们需要考虑排名内容是否受到整个社会的重视。因为如果不是这样，评级可能会产生意想不到的后果。” 

Lewis and Carlos, professors at the BYU Marriott School, believe that the companies decreased their charitable giving because they were concerned that their primary audience—their investors—would be displeased to see the company giving away their money. 

杨百翰大学万豪商学院的教授刘易斯和卡洛斯认为，这些公司之所以减少了它们的慈善捐赠，是因为它们担心它们的主要受众——它们的投资者，会不高兴看到公司把他们的钱捐出去。 

"At the time, the dominant belief was that the shareholders were the most important and that the company's only role was to provide higher financial returns to their investors," Carlos said. "The competing belief system, that companies have a broader obligation to society, was less accepted then." 

卡洛斯说：“当时的主流观点是，股东是最重要的，公司的唯一作用是为其投资者提供更高的财务回报。与之竞争的观点体系，即公司对社会有更广泛的义务，在当时不那么被接受。” 

In other words, in an environment where corporate social responsibility was novel, a rating intended to praise companies for philanthropy actually signaled that firms were underperforming for shareholders, prompting the companies to hastily pull back on giving. 

换句话说，在一个企业社会责任还是很新鲜的环境中。旨在赞扬企业的慈善评级实际上表明了，企业对股东的表现不佳。这促使了企业匆忙减少捐赠。 

Authors argue that in contrast to the prevailing assumption that organizations will strive for favorable ratings to achieve reputational benefits, incompatibility between a positive rating and a dominant institutional logic may cause recognized firms to question the perceived value of maintaining superior performance, thus leading them to strategically reduce their efforts on the rated dimension. Using a difference-in-differences design, authors examine how companies responded to being rated as charitable organizations, an evaluation that they argue was generally perceived as incompatible with the dominant logic of shareholder maximization during the early 1990s. The results suggest that firms that were rated as generous were more likely to decrease philanthropic contributions relative to firms that were not rated as generous. These findings provide insights for scholarship on organizational reactivity and impression management and raise important questions for scholars and practitioners interested in improving the effectiveness of evaluation metrics as drivers of organizational performance. 

两位作者认为，与组织将努力获得有利评级以实现声誉利益的普遍假设相反，正面评级与主导制度逻辑之间的不相容，可能会导致被认可的企业质疑保持卓越表现的感知价值，从而导致它们战略性地减少在评级维度上的努力。作者们使用二重差分模型，研究了公司对被评为有慈善性的组织的反应。他们认为这种评价在20世纪90年代初被普遍认为是与股东最大化的主导逻辑不相容。结果表明，相对于那些没有被评为“慷慨”的企业，被评为“慷慨”的企业更有可能减少慈善捐款。这些发现为关于组织反应性和印象管理的学术研究提供了见解。并为有兴趣提高评级指标作为组织绩效驱动因素的有效性的学者和实践者提出了重要问题。 

The authors are gathering more recent data to determine how these social responsibility ratings affect companies now. Beliefs about businesses' responsibilities have shifted since the 1990s, and philanthropy may give a bigger boost to a company's reputation, enhancing its performance as a result. Given this shift in beliefs, Lewis and Carlos are not expecting to find the same dip in giving that they found in the early 1990s. 

两位作者正在收集更多最新的数据，以确定这些社会责任评级对现在的公司有何影响。自20世纪90年代以来，人们对企业责任的观点已经发生了变化。慈善事业可能会对公司的声誉产生更大的推动作用，从而提高其业绩。鉴于这种观点的转变，刘易斯和卡洛斯预计不会出现他们在20世纪90年代初发现的捐赠下降。 

But the underlying principle the study reveals still holds, the researchers said, and they anticipate that for today's contested issues, positive ratings could have similarly unexpected results. 

但研究人员说，这项研究揭示的基本原则仍然有效。他们预计，对于今天有争议的问题，正面的评级也可能产生类似的意外结果。 

"Currently we see some companies trying to improve their reputation on polarizing social or political issues such as race, gender, immigration and the environment, but other companies with a different primary audience may be trying to avoid 'virtuous' rating labels on these issues," Lewis said. 

刘易斯说：“目前，我们看到一些公司试图在种族、性别、移民和环境等两极化的社会或政治问题上提高自己的声誉。但其他拥有不同主要受众的公司，可能试图在这些问题上避免‘有道德的’的评级标签。” 

Those who hope that ratings will incentivize improvement should carefully consider the design of their rating system, factoring in social perceptions around issues to see if they are aligned with values generally accepted by society at large. 

那些希望通过评级来激励改进的人，应该仔细考虑他们评级系统的设计。将社会对问题的看法考虑进去，看它们是否与整个社会普遍接受的价值观相一致。 

However, Carlos pointed out, ratings' unintended consequences might not always be a bad thing. "It's worth considering the long game and exercising patience. Although initially ratings may not encourage the behavior we hope in the moment, a couple of decades later, we might find something different. Ratings can spark ongoing dialogue and social change over the long term." 

然而，卡洛斯指出，评级的意外后果可能并不总是一件坏事。他说：“值得考虑的是长期的策略和耐心的锻炼。虽然最初的评级可能不会鼓励我们当下希望的行为，但几十年后，我们可能会发现一些不同的东西。从长期来看，评级可以引发持续的对话和社会变革。” 

The article, titled "Avoiding the Appearance of Virtue: Reactivity to Corporate Social Responsibility Ratings in an Era of Shareholder Primacy" published Oct. 11 in Administrative Science Quarterly. 

这篇文章的标题是《避免美德的出现：在股东至上的时代，对企业社会责任评级的反应》，于2022年10月11日发表在《行政科学季刊/Administrative Science Quarterly》上。