A content analysis of corporate social responsibility: Perspectives from China’s top 30 hotel-management companies

There is a growing demand for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the tourism and hospitality industry, but its role in some emerging countries, such as China, has seldom been examined. The purpose of this article is to broaden research into CSR by considering it in the context of the Chinese hotel industry, so helping to fill this omission in the literature. Drawing its empirical material from CSR information released by a representative sample of Chinese hotel-management companies, this study reveals that – while there is considerable variation in the information that the 30 largest organizations provide publicly – they all place considerable importance on their highly valued stakeholders (community, environment, government, employee and customer), the other stakeholders (investor, supplier, mission and values) receive much less coverage. This uneven phenomenon is also reflected in the methods used to disseminate CSR information employed by these companies, which suggests that contextualized social, economic, and cultural differences should be taken into consideration in order to more effectively understand and practice CSR in emerging economies.