Comparative Approach for Local Standards of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Korea, China and Japan - Major Automobile Makers’ Reporting Practices -

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) already became a critical issue in Northeast Asia three countries, Korea, China and Japan. There exist the differences of CSR practices among three countries due to the difference of historical, cultural background and growth process. So this study examined the difference of CSR practices among them by looking into the CSR development process and the structural features of major CSR standards of each country. A key commonality of CSR development processes among three countries is the significance of ‘economic responsibility’ at the initial stage of national economy growth. However the CSR approaches of three country to access the side effects of rapid growth were somewhat different each other. In case of Japan, environment issues were managed seriously but in Korea the managerial ethic of conglomerates or labor practices emerged as the urgent issues. Chinese government put more emphasis on Chinese specific CSR standard. In addition this study examined CSR reports of major automobile makers of three countries to reduce the gap between the literature review and actual CSR cases. Globally the environment and labor practices including human rights are key issues of CSR. And the GRI guideline, G4 became the most influential global standard. This study investigated twenty automobile makers’ social responsibility (SR) websites and reports, and analyzed how much each report covered the performance indexes of environment and labor practices of GRI G4. Consequently most of the automobile makers turned out to more use GRI G4 or ISO 26000 as the CSR standard rather than the local standards. Also Japanese makers and Hyundai showed higher coverage rates than Chinese makers as for environment indexes of GRI G4. Most of Chinese makers were still far away from the environment indexes of GRI G4 although they showed relatively higher coverage rates for labor practices than the environment of GRI G4.