BRIAN K. BURTON, JIING-LIH FARH and W. HARVEY HEGARTY A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ORIENTATION: HONG KONG VS. UNITED STATES STUDENTS (Accepted 4 February 2000) ABSTRACT. This study examined the orientation toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) of 165 U.S. and 157 Hong Kong business students. Although respondents from both countries viewed CSR as a construct in much the same way, many differences were found in the types of responsibilities considered most important. Specifically, Hong Kong students gave economic responsibilities more weight and noneconomic responsibilities less weight than did U.S. students. KEY WORDS: corporate social responsibility, cross-cultural, Hong Kong, students The issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is more complicated now than ever. The increasing global nature of the marketplace calls for business persons to interact with others who come from different countries, with different cultures, and perhaps with different expectations regarding the corporation’s place in society. This paper examines whether different cultures weight the various types of corporate responsibilities differently in a test of Hong Kong and United States business students. THE LITERATURE ON CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Wood (1991) has claimed that CSR is one of the three basic areas of social issues research. The topic continues to attract researchers (Sethi, 1995). Wood also noted that Carroll’s (1979) CSR framework, which posits four basic types of corporate responsibilities – economic (producing goods and services at a profit), legal (obeying the laws while trying to make a profit), ethical (behaving in accordance with societal norms not embodied in law), and discretionary (going beyond other responsibilities to act as a societal institution in philanthropic ways) – is often used to explain the construct. According to Wood, these four types of responsibilities are actually domains in which managers can operate. Because managers have discretion regarding the domain in which they choose to operate at Teaching Business Ethics 4: 151–167, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.