A corporate social responsibility implementation index for architectural design firms in Vietnam

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a popular concept in the construction industry because of the growing concerns over sustainable development. While architectural design firms (ADFs) hold an essential role in construction projects, there is a lack of studies examining CSR implementation (CSRI) in these organizations. This research aims to identify common CSR activities and to develop a CSRI index that enables practitioners to understand the importance of each CSR group. Through literature review and semi-structured interviews, critical CSR activities were first identified. Through factor analysis, 24 CSR activities were then organized into six groups. The fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) technique was employed to value the importance of each group, which then be normalized to determine the CSRI index. The findings highlight that CSRI in Vietnamese ADFs is at a pretty high level. The clients' interest CSR group ranks as the most critical position, followed by employees' interest, community engagement, ethics, shareholders' and partners' interest, and environment preservation, respectively. This research is one of the first studies that examine and evaluate CSRI in ADFs. The CSRI index is a robust formulation that provides Vietnamese ADFs with a practical tool to allocate scarce organizational resources to gain competitive business advantages properly.