According to Ms. Chen, whether corporations can voluntarily take stakeholders’ interests into consideration and fulfill social responsibility depends on whether they can benefit from such activities. In the broad sense of corporate management, besides shouldering legal and economic responsibilities, corporations must satisfy the needs of all stakeholders who can help maximize efficiency and corporations are therefore motivated to engage in activities concerning social responsibility. 

 

Ms. Chen analyzed data on the energy conservation mode implemented by 191 companies from 2009 to 2011 in 8 fields in Australia, including banking and public affairs industry. The result is that corporations can benefit from energy conservation in the long run despite the growing costs at the beginning.

 

Chen´s speech got good response from the audience. Someone raised the question about the availability of the data and said they are only relevant to energy efficiency rather than corporate social responsibility. Ms. Chen explained that as a challenging task, measuring the fulfillment of corporate social responsibility must rely on a project which can be exposed in the public. Energy efficiency is an ideal choice since it can avoid variations during the exposure so that we can objectively measure corporate social responsibility. Furthermore, for companies from which the samples are obtained, energy preservation is an issue highly related to corporate social responsibility.