Social responsibility and crowdfunding businesses: a measurement development study

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of social responsibility of crowdfunding industry, an industry that is expanding rapidly as an alternative source of finance and new business model, while failing to sufficiently advance and adhere to good social responsibility practices. The paper develops a stakeholder-based rating system of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among crowdfunding platforms that could assist in making this industry more trustworthy and robust. Design/methodology/approach - The approach is based on exploratory research methodology, using interviews as data collection tool, to develop an initial understanding of the dimension and issues that define a construct for measuring the social responsibility of crowdfunding businesses. Findings - The paper offers a preliminary construct for measuring the social responsibility of crowdfunding businesses, which identifies the stakeholders’ dimensions to be measured, assigned a relative weight for those stakeholders within an aggregated CSR measure and identified the social responsibility issues to be gauged. Originality/value - This research adds to the understanding of the under studied subject of social responsibility of crowdfunding industry by developing a stakeholder-based rating system of CSR among crowdfunding businesses that could assist in making this industry more trustworthy and robust, thereby laying out an agenda for further research on the topic.