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Extant studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) have mainly focused on established corporations; the context of new ventures remains largely unexplored. This study aims to address this gap by exploring the patterns of socially responsible activities in new ventures.

This study uses the perspective of stakeholders to differentiate external CSR activities (efforts directed toward external stakeholders) from internal CSR activities (efforts directed toward employees) and performs empirical tests using a sample of 3,650 Chinese private firms.

This study empirically shows that new ventures are more involved in external CSR activities and less involved in internal CSR activities than mature firms. New ventures prioritize their limited resources to fulfill the expectations of external stakeholders rather than those of internal stakeholders. External stakeholders are considered primary stakeholders because of their potential to satisfy critical organizational needs at the start-up stage. However, new ventures tend to cut the spending on employee benefits, ignoring the potential effect of this investment on their long-term growth. After testing the moderating effect of financial resource availability, we find that new ventures with high financial resource availability are inclined to implement external CSR strategy rather than internal CSR strategy.

This study focuses on new ventures and reveals the influence of organizational life cycle on CSR decisions. The findings may be limited to the context of China or emerging markets. Thus, further research is needed to compare the patterns of CSR activities in new ventures under different institutional environments.

This study indicates that new ventures are inclined to implement external CSR strategy rather than internal CSR strategy. This choice may be rational in the short term, but insufficient investment in employee benefits may affect the long-term growth of these firms. Therefore, they must also focus on their internal CSR activities.

This study is one of the few studies to investigate the patterns of socially responsible activities in new ventures in a transition economy. The findings in this study can help reconcile the seemingly contradictory views on whether new ventures are socially responsible and contribute to our understanding about CSR strategy in these firms.

This paper aims to introduce the history and major achievement of the Chinese private enterprise survey (CPES), which is one of the most enduring large-scale nationwide sample surveys in China, providing important micro firm-level data for understanding and studying the development of Chinese enterprises and entrepreneurs over the past 26 years.

The main body of this paper is based on a bibliometric analysis of all literature using CPES until 2017.

This paper discusses problems that users may encounter during data mining. By doing so, it can assist other researchers to get a better understanding of what has been done (e.g. journals, topics, scholars and institutions) and do their research in a more targeted way.

As members of the survey project team, the authors also take a prospect of the future data design and use, as well as offer some suggestions about how to use the CPES data to improve high-quality development and business environment evaluation in China.

This paper is the first to provide an overall picture of academic papers in China and abroad that have used the CPES data.