ABSTRACT
Whereas social licence pressure is held as a strong motive for the CSR of large enterprises, it is argued in academic literature that it will not sufficiently motivate SMEs. We conjecture, however, that social licence pressure may also be important for SMEs because of the strong embeddedness of SMEs in their local communities, but large-scale empirical studies supporting this hypothesis are still lacking. Chapter 13 shows that social licence pressures significantly affect the EP of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, directly as well as indirectly, through mediation by the perceived market benefits of CSR. In all cases, the social licence pressure provides a stronger stimulus to improving EP than the motive to comply with government regulation.
