Reputation Risk Management: A Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting Perspective

This paper explores one of the reputation risk management (RRM) processes through which corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting can help companies achieve reputation gains, or at least mitigate reputation losses. The paper presents and analyzes a case study of Nippon Steel Sustainability Report 2008, which is a CSR report published by Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC). The key elements revealed in the report were (1) financial performance; (2) quality of management; (3) social and environmental responsibility performance; (4) employee quality and (5) the quality of the goods/services provided. These five elements played a crucial role in ranking companies according to their reputation scores. The paper analyzes the report with content analysis. In addition, an image restoration framework is employed in the paper. The analysis leads to two conclusions about the CSR reporting which companies can use to manage reputation risk. First, CSR reporting as a communication tool can deliver information on five elements of reputation which would enhance reputation capital. Second, some image restoration strategies are employed in CSR reporting, which implies that CSR reporting could work as part of RRM process.