Corporate Social Responsibility: what impact on the adoption of Green IT practices?

Abstract

While the literature relative to the environment-friendly behaviors mainly puts forwardregulations, subsidies or even the research of economic benefits and social legitimacy toexplain their adoption, our contribution also takes into consideration the question of thevoluntary adoption of these approaches. We particularly asking if the adoption of environ-ment-friendly behaviors in matter of information systems (IS), qualified as Green IT, canalso be the expression of the approach of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) withinthe field of IS. The intensity of the commitment to CSR approach and different types ofGreen IT are considered. To our knowledge, this has not yet been studied in the IS literatureso far. To analyze the relationship CSR / Green IT, we crosschecked data from two surveysconducted in 2008 and 2011 with the same population of companies based in Luxem-bourg: one focused on CSR and the other one on the use of ICT in companies. From adatabase of 815 valid questionnaires resulting from the merger of these two surveys, the ar-ticle shows that being a company engaged in a CSR approach positively affects the adop-tion of Green IT practices. In addition, these results reveal the existence of a positive andsignificant effect of the intensity of the commitment to a CSR approach on the adoption ofthe most advanced types of Green IT practices. Thus, our work suggests that the approachof CSR is a determinant of Green IT practices but that the latter does not constitute a ho-mogeneous whole since it is possible to differentiate them according to the intensity of com-mitment to CSR approach