Expert assessment of socially responsible activities of enterprises using the goal tree method on the example of the printing industry

Abstract

Socially responsible activities of enterprises are difficult to measure and, as a consequence, to diagnose. The most common method of evaluating socially responsible activities of an enterprise is expert evaluation. The disadvantage of this method is the high level of subjectivity and intuitiveness. The specified problem determined the purpose of the research – to develop an approach to evaluate the results of enterprises’ activities in the aspect of social responsibility, which would allow to involve experts only at the stage of formalising social responsibility norms, and the actual level of fulfilment of these norms should be calculated not by expert means, but on the basis of objective data on the enterprise’s activities. To fulfil the set aim, the work developed an approach to evaluate socially responsible activities of enterprises based on the application of the goal tree method. The paper proposes a procedure for building and quantitative analysis of a goal tree in the aspect of social responsibility, which involves taking into account: 1) expert assessments of social responsibility norms; 2) objective data on compliance with the norms of social responsibility at the analysed enterprise; 3) expert evaluations of the enterprise’s capabilities to comply with these norms; 4) values of parameters of the external environment that affect these capabilities. The procedure for building and quantitative analysis of a goal tree in the aspect of social responsibility is demonstrated on the example of the printing industry. The proposed approach allows: to evaluate social results of the company’s activity; to analyse problems and external limitations in the aspect of social responsibility; to formulate tasks of reducing external limitations on the enterprise’s capability to fulfil the norms of social responsibility. This will contribute to increasing the efficiency of the decisionmaking process for managing results of the enterprise’s socially responsible activities.