The impact of institutional and social context on corporate environmental, social and governance performance of companies committed to voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives

Using a Neo-institutional framework, this paper discusses the role of national-specific social, cultural, legal, regulatory and economic differences when determining the way that companies committed to a specific voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative operate in different sustainability dimensions. The differences between companies' environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of the companies operating in the three countries with highest number of firms committed to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) Spain, France and Japan is assessed through a multidimensional HJ-Biplot technique, which is a statistical technique that provides a joint graphical representation in a low dimensional Euclidean space (usually a plane), of a multivariate data matrix. This research contributes to the existing literature providing quantitative evidence of how different country-specific social and institutional schemes influence companies' ESG performance. The main results reveal the existence of two clusters of companies behaving in different ways with regard of sustainability issues. First, Spanish and French companies exhibit similar levels of social and corporate governance performance, higher than those of Japanese firms. Second, Japanese firms seem more committed to environmental issues than Spanish and French companies. These results confirm that the different countries, with different institutional backgrounds, induce different priorities among their firms, in terms of ESG performance, even under a common commitment to the same principles of adopted CSR initiative. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.