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Abstract

The scarcity of research on the public’s responses towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries has inspired this research. The research is aimed at studying the consumers’ awareness of, their attitude and behavioural intentions towards socially responsible companies in the Egyptian market. The relevant CSR literature was recapitulated into a conceptual framework, and an empirical study was conducted through a mixed research design. Exploratory qualitative interviews were conducted with corporate managers of a sample of five companies in the Egyptian market. Then, a descriptive quantitative research was conducted through a survey on a non-probability sample of consumers. The results revealed that consumers in Egypt are actually aware of the CSR concept and even tend to develop positive attitude towards socially responsible companies. Yet, when it comes to the evaluative purchasing criteria that consumers value the most, economic criteria are apparently still given a priority over the social criteria. CSR相关文献进行了概括成一个概念框架，并通过混合研究设计进行了实证研究。五家公司的样本企业管理者在埃及市场探索性的定性进行了采访。然后，一个描述性的定量研究，通过调查进行非概率抽样的消费者。结果表明，在埃及消费者真正意识到企业社会责任的概念和积极的态度对社会负责的公司更倾向于发展。然而，当涉及到评估的采购标准，消费者最看重的，经济的标准显然仍给予优先于社会标准。

Introduction

Today, numerous researchers and managers believe that companies have underlying responsibilities towards the societies they are operating in, and therefore, companies need to acknowledge environmental and social aspects into their decisions. This reflects the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is not a recent concept because it has captured the interest of both academicians and practitioners for several years (Vaaland et al., 2008;Foster et al., 2009). However, its importance for practitioners has greatly increased lately (Moir, 2001; Swaen, 2003; Kotler and Lee,2005; Phillips, 2006; Montiel, 2008), where the adoption of CSR activities rose rapidly as a corporate priority (Vlachos et al.,2009). CSR is now considered an industry on its own, where consultancies have started to advise companies on how to design,implement and communicate CSR strategies (Dusuki, 2008).Nowadays, there are also CSR-related awards that are aimed at encouraging companies to become more socially responsible(Morsing, 2006).今天，众多的研究者和管理者认为，企业对他们所经营的社会，因此相关责任，企业需要认识到环境和社会方面为他们的决定。这反映了企业的社会责任（CSR），这是不是一个新的概念的概念，因为它抓住了几年（Vaaland等，2008年，福斯特等人，2009年）的学者和从业者的权益。然而，其对从业人员的重要性已经大大增加，最近（莫伊尔，2001年，2003年Swaen科特勒和Lee，2005;菲利普斯，2006年，蒙铁尔，2008年），采用CSR活动迅速上升为企业的首要任务（VLACHOS等，2009）。 CSR公司现在被认为是一个行业自身的顾问公司已经开始向企业如何设计，实施和沟通CSR战略（Dusuki，2008）。如今，也有企业社会责任相关的奖项，旨在鼓励企业成为更有社会责任感（Morsing，2006年）。
Also on the academic level, CSR started to receive greater attention in recent years. The growing attention given to CSR was reflected in the shift from top management publications to specialized CSR journals (Montiel, 2008). These CSR publications have studied various aspects regarding the CSR concept, such as the companies’ motives behind their engagement in CSR practices, the selection and implementation of CSR initiatives, corporate returns received from investments in CSR practices, and among other issues. However, the literature holds limited findings with respect to the returns that companies receive from their CSR programmes (Vaaland et al., 2008). In addition, the literature discusses varying – and sometimes contradicting – views about the stakeholders’ responses towards socially responsible companies, whether emp