Identification of Stakeholders Importance for the Company’s Social Responsibility using the Analytic Hierarchy Process

The idea of the current article is to identify the influence of stakeholders on corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the specific company. In general, by following CSR principles the company is trying to pursue two goals, which are the following: to be socially responsible and to create a good image in society to get higher profit. The important point is to decide which stakeholders have a strong influence on corporate social responsibility in order to develop strong relations with them and to build an effective CSR program. Thus, as the result of the application of the current method the company would be able to understand, with which stakeholders to develop its relations in order to improve its image in the external environment. The task of evaluating stakeholder influence on company SR quantitatively is quite complicated. Thus, a special method that combines expert judgments with quantitative evaluation needs to be applied. For this purpose, method based on Analytic Hierarchy Process is suggested to be used in the article. As a result of the method application, we receive the overall estimation of stakeholder influence on company SR. The latter permits us to decide with which stakeholders to work more actively. To conduct the calculations Expert Choice 11 computational toolkit was used.

I. Introduction

The development of Ukrainian society leads to the fact that companies operating in this country started to consider issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR) seriously. This happens due to the following reasons: Ukrainian companies really want to be socially responsible and they want to improve their image in the society that would result in higher profits. The key research of basic principles of CSR are the following [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7]. The analysis of CSR shows that the issues has different aspects and perspectives. According to [1; 2] the important aspect of CSR is dealing with the company stakeholders. The ability of the company to deal with its stakeholders leads to a better image in the society and as the result the higher profits.