Taking-off corporate social responsibility programs: An AHP application in airline industry

The notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) involves multiple stakeholders and is directly pertinent with quality, strategy, sustainability, and brand image of an organization. CSR endeavors include a wide range of core focuses such as community participation and cultivation, customer involvement, equitable operating demeanor, and environment, among others. Stakeholders within the society expect excellent organizations attain and perpetuate culminating results from CSR conduct that entertain or outpace expectations. In this paper, a multi-criteria decision-making methodology (MCDM), Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), is applied in Turkish airline industry to assess and weigh the CSR program criteria among multiple alternatives. The proposed evaluation model identifies key factors regarding the criteria and sub-criteria of a CSR program hierarchically in the airline industry. Questionnaires based on the pairwise comparison, answered by thirty-one experts working in four different major airline companies, are used to assess the relative importance of related factors. Then, fuzzy linguistic variables are adopted to rank the selected CSR programs of airliner companies. It is observed that CSR paradigm in the airline industry is envisaged within a restricted economic realm besieging social and environmental dimensions, rather than within the totality of systemic efforts towards multi-faceted issues. The study is important in putting forth the current CSR opinion of the Turkish airline companies.