Jordan Journal of Business Administration, Volume 7, No. 1, 2011 - 95 - The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Companies Perceived Performance: A Comparative Study between Local and Foreign Companies in Jordan Hani H. Al-Dmour and Hayat A. Askar ABSTRACT This study aimed at answering a question that has been a topic of academic interest for several years, albeit receiving inadequate attention in the Jordanian literature. Particularly, the question if there was an impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the perceived business performance of two groups of companies in Jordan, local and foreign. Two more questions were interwoven to this issue, and these were investigating the extent to what companies were practicing the CSR, and if there were differences in the perceived business performance due to some companies’ characteristics such as capital, number of years in business, economic sector, and number of employees. A quantitative methodology was followed and data were collected out of 83 questionnaires. Different types of analysis were employed to test the research hypotheses; independent and one-sample t-test, multiple regression analysis and ANOVA. The study ends up with the following main findings: First: CSR was implemented among companies with differences in the practices of the environmental part of CSR, where foreign companies showed positive implementation while the local showed negative implementation. Second: there was a significant positive impact of CSR only on marketing performance. Third: this relationship did not differ when a comparison between two samples was conducted. Fourth: the analysis showed that only the perceived economic performance differs due to the type of industrial sector to which these companies belong. Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, Business Performance. INTRODUCTION A new trend of growing importance in the world is the tendency towards a more socially responsible business. In today's environment of global competition and open market, the wider aim of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is to create higher standards of living, while preserving the profitability of the corporation, for people both inside and outside the firm (Hopkins, 2004). Since being socially responsible involves costs, CSR should generate benefits as well in order to be a sustainable business practice (Tsorouta, 2004). Business, however, has long debated whether the level of companies' involvement with their society may affect their business performance. In view of that, the main purpose of the study is to investigate whether CSR has an impact on the business performance as perceived by companies. The study aims also at finding out the differences in the impact of CSR on business performance between the local and foreign companies, and if there are differences in the perceived Received on 8/3/2009 and Accepted for Publication on 6/9/2010. © 2011 DAR Publishers/University of Jordan. All Rights Reserved.