Corporate Social Responsibility - ett sätt att skapa förtroende?

Sammanfattning: This essay recognizes and criticizes a commonly held assumption that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) functions as a “savings account of trust” between corporations and consumers. Based on five focus group interviews, the authors discuss how corporations that engage in society can sometimes raise and sometimes destroy the trust of potential consumers. One of our main findings is that CSR seems to raise the expectations among consumers. We then compare this phenomenon with the classical theory of the disconfirmation paradigm. This brings the reader to the attention that CSR sometimes can function as ‘lowering the perceived performance’, and thus have a negative affect on trust.