CSR communication in Turkey: Research on company reports in stock market indices

The communication strategy of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is one of the important subjects of CSR implementations, which is integrating to the management policy in recent years, of the firms. Because, the achievement of the CSR practices is related with high stakeholder perception. In this scope a successful CSR communication supports to reach the target group and influence of them. While there are lots of CSR communication tools according to the target groups, companies prefer to use reports ecpecially for financiers and investors. The stakeholders are informed about the CSR implementations of the companies in the reports, even the details of this implementations are shared with with the target groups by the reports. This thesis aims to determine if the effectiveness of the reports in the framework CSR communication, also to compare the international CSR standards and this reports. In this concept, there was created a sample, covers companies which are traded in Borsa Istanbul (BIST) which is the first stock exchange in Turkey. Also the reports were investigated by using quantitative analysis methodology. The paper consists of three chapters. There are included the meaning of CSR, conceptation of CSR communication and the historical background of CSR to cerate a common ground in the first chapter. The second chapter presents information about BIST and social responsible company approach of BIST. The findings and results of the research, which was realized among 77 firms in BIST 50 Index, Corporate Management Index and Sustainability Index, are shared in the last chapter. According to the results the rate of using reports in the framework of CSR communication which are in Sustainability Index is higher than the other indexes. Also there was determined that companies in the Sustainability Index use word of "CSR" or "Sustainability" as the title of reports. On the other hand, to be in just Corporate Management Index does not effect to have CSR implementations on the level of international and use the reports as a tool for CSR communication. Also there is appeared that companies which are in both Corporate Management Index and BIST 50 Index have higher CSR perception and use the reports as a tool for CSR communication effectively. Key Words: CSR Communication, CSR Reporting, BIST Sustainability Index, BIST Corporate Management Index, BIST 50 Index