THE SME OWNERS’ PERCEPTION ON CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: AN APPROACH BASED ON COGNITIVE MAPPING

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now established as an integral part of corporate strategy and therefore as having an impact on the firm’s perennial life. In spite of the large diffusion of the CSR topic and the importance of SME in national markets, the main researches focus on large companies. SME deserves its own tools. With the more direct impact of the manager decision, SME constitutes a privileged field of research for a cognitive approach of the corporate responsibility toward society. This approach, with a cognitive mapping technique will allow us to schematize the managers’ representations about the stakeholders and their relation. The cognitive maps built will provide information about main CSR issues and make it possible to localize and highlight changes’ brakes about those issues.