Abstract:
Every business enterprise operates within a given society and the relationships that a business
has with the society have been discussed by several scholars in the context of corporate social
responsibility. The basic idea of CSR is that business and society are interwoven rather than distinct
entities; therefore, society has certain expectations for appropriate business behavior and outcomes.
The main purpose of the study is to determine the effect of CSR initiatives on competitive advantage of
brewery firms. The study employed explanatory research design and convenience sampling technique
was applied to select 375 samples; however, statistical data was collected only from 341. Primary
data were collected through survey questionnaire. The data were analyzed through descriptive and
inferential statistics by using SPSS version 20. The result of the study has shown that there is a
relationship between social responsibility dimensions and competitive advantage of firms. The results
reveal that both CSR aspect of employees and environment have significant and positive effect on the
competitive advantage of firms. However; CSR towards customers and local community have
insignificant effect on the companies’ competitive advantage. The result also depicted that the
aggregate result of CSR has significant and positive effect on competitive advantage of firms. It is
recommended that brewery firms that want to compete effectively in an industry should be able to use
their social initiatives strategically to achieve competitive advantage at least in the long- run.
