Corporate Social Responsibility practices have been on the rise in recent years in firms all over the world. Brazil, as one of the most important countries emerging on the international scene, is no exception to this, with more and more firms taking up these practices. The present study focuses on analyzing the corporate social responsibility practices that Brazilian companies engage into. The sample used is comprised of 500 firms grouped by geographical area; the theoretical framework is based on stakeholder and institutional theories; and the technique used for the analysis is the biplot, more specifically the HJ Biplot and cluster analysis. From the results obtained it is possible to infer that the CSR variables corresponding to environmental practices are more closely linked to companies located in the northern areas of Brazil. Social and community practices are related to companies primarily in the southern and northeastern regions of the country.

In recent years,  interest in the practice of corporate social responsibility has increased worldwide. On one hand, companies are becoming more and more interested in legitimizing themselves before society and raising awareness of their responsible practices, and on the other hand, society is more interested in knowing that companies are indeed practicing social responsibility.

we focus on an emerging country, Brazil, which has become a point of reference for the business community; many Brazilian companies have adopted social policies while following the guidelines proposed by the Instituto Ethos (Casanova & Dumas, 2010), and according to Correa, Flynn, & Amit (2004), Brazil is the Latin American country where corporate social responsibility has been given the most importance and where close to 500 companies have reported following the guidelines proposed by this Institute.

More and more frequently entrepreneurs and executives undertake business projects giving a clear priority to corporate social responsibility practices (Griesse, 2007, Scharf, 2009, Young, 2004, Barin-Cruz & Boehe, 2010). For example, in 1995 Rodrigo Baggio created the NGO Comitê para Democratização da Informática (CDI) with the goal of using information technology as a tool to socially include low-income communities. This model has been extended to other emerging countries such as India. Companies like Natura, for example, not only publish corporate social responsibility practices in sustainability reports following the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI, 2011) guidelines, but they have also integrated corporate social responsibility practices as part of their business strategy. Another example of companies taking on corporate social responsibility practices is Petrobras, which has adopted these practices as an integrated part of its core business strategy and actively participates in many diversified social activities.

These references clearly show the important role that Brazil plays as a pioneer country in Latin America when it comes to corporate social responsibility. The present study focuses on analyzing the corporate social responsibility practices that Brazilian companies engage in. To do so, we used the HJ Biplot and cluster technique to interpret the data provided by the Instituto Ethos on 500 Brazilian companies belonging to different sectors of activities and practicing CSR.

From the results obtained it was possible to infer that the variables corresponding to responsible environmental practices are more closely linked to the companies located in the northern areas of Brazil, whereas other variables representing social and community practices are related to companies from the south and northeast of the country. It can be highlighted that companies in the southeast of the country tend to focus on product responsibility.