Regional and sectoral differentiation of corporate social responsibility in the Russian Federation: Assessment methodology

The topic of corporate social responsibility is being actively studied from the perspective of various directions, but its research at the level of individual industries and regions remains underdeveloped. The lack of uniform standards and methodologies makes it difficult to analyze and compare the effectiveness of social initiatives at the interregional and intersectoral levels. In turn, the current situation creates obstacles to identifying leaders in the field of corporate social responsibility and spreading their best practices to other industries and regions where the development of this area is still at an early stage. In this regard, the aim of this study is to determine the regional differentiation of the level of involvement of Russian companies in the practice of corporate social responsibility, taking into account their industry specifics. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to solve the following tasks: to systematize existing methods, approaches, models and ratings for assessing the level of development of corporate social responsibility in Russian companies, highlighting their key parameters and limitations; to develop an algorithm for assessing the level of involvement of companies in corporate social responsibility, integrating the best practices of existing approaches and enabling cross‑industry and interregional comparison. We used general scientific (analysis, synthesis, comparison, etc.) and special (site parsing, rating) methods when preparing our study. Based on the research results, a rating was formed that allows classifying regions according to the degree of presence of companies with varying degrees of corporate social responsibility implementation in the context of industry groups. Further development of this work involves analyzing the conditions that allow certain regions to become centers of concentration of “responsible” business, as well as studying the most effective practices of social responsibility using the example of regions whose enterprises have a constant level of involvement in corporate social responsibility.