Employer Branding in the Fashion Industry: CSR Actions by Fashion SMEs
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I take issue with two premises of the article. One is that Caroll's pyramid is still relevant today. Many authors argue, with good reason, that charity is the top level of CSR. I am thinking here not only of the liberal Nobel Prize-winning Friedman but also of more recent authors such as Porter, who accepts charity only if it generates business benefits for the company. The other problem is that I agree with those who do not equate CSR with corporate sustainability. It is particularly striking after the wording of the 17 UN SDGs that the two categories cannot be treated as synonymous. CSR, as it appears in its name, in fact refers only to the social pillar of sustainability. The environmental and economic dimensions are at most indirect. It would be worth considering this and improving the article accordingly.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The study investigates how SMEs operating in the fashion industry consider the concepts of sustainability, corporate social responsibility and business ethics in their everyday operations and which CSR-related attributes are taken into account while trying to improve employer branding.
The topic addressed is significant and timely. The authors did a reasonable job in conducting the empirical work.
Some minor suggestions that in my opinion may contribute to improve the impact of the article are in the following:
Some more descriptive stats on the sample are advisable: revenues, total assets, % of exports.
I suggest to the author(s) to better underline the motivations that underpin their study: why CSR is important for employer branding? Why employer branding is important for SMEs in the fashion industry?
I’d expected that some policy indications and possible further lines of research would have been disclosed in the concluding section.
Finally, the author(s) may consider reviewing these other documents:
Montiel, I., (2008), Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Sustainability Separate Pasts, Common Futures Organization & Environment Volume 21 Number 3, 245-269, 10.1177/1086026608321329
Latapí Agudelo, M.A., Jóhannsdóttir, L. & Davídsdóttir, B. A literature review of the history and evolution of corporate social responsibility. Int J Corporate Soc Responsibility 4, 1 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40991-018-0039-y
S. Bustamante, F. Pizzutilo, M. Martinovic, S. Herrero Olarte (2021) Corporate Social Responsibility and Employer Attractiveness – An International Perspective, Springer Nature, ISBN 978-3-030-68860-8
LIANG, H. and RENNEBOOG, L. (2017), On the Foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility. The Journal of Finance, 72: 853-910. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12487
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The following are my comments and suggestions for the manuscript:
- The introduction section should be motivated better.
- The abstract claims that the study is about CSR and employer branding. However, in the Introduction section, related research and research gap on employer branding is never mentioned. Why is employer branding important? Why CSR and employee branding? What specific relationship between CSR and employer branding do you intend to investigate? “No research work has not examined” does not necessarily mean research gap. What are the limitations of the current research on both CSR and employer branding? The two research questions raised do not seem to be about the relationships between CSR and employer branding.
- Methods: Why use qualitative methods especially interviews to answer the RQs? Please provide further and more specific rationale. More information regarding sampling need to be provided. How were the companies selected? How did the country coordinators select the companies? Were there any selection criteria? Randomly? Based on the SME definition (size wise), were the sampled companies are all classified as small?
- What specific coding procedure did you use?
- The results only display tables of quotes. What do these quotes mean? What are the relationships between concepts found in the quotes? What are codes, concepts/constructs found in the qualitative data? I suggest you visualize the coding results e.g. network diagram to better convey the results of this study (answers to RQs).
- On writing: Please proofread for grammatical mistakes. Acronyms need to spelled out first before using e.g. UN, SARS, etc.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
