Purpose

Typhoon Hato attacked Macau in August 2017 and had caused fatalities and extensive damages. This study aims to analyze the reactions of the city’s six casinos after the natural disaster from the perspective of corporate social responsibility (CSR), with particular emphasis on finding out which stakeholders had they directed their support mostly.

Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative content analyses of press releases, social media, company reports and websites of the casinos in relation to the disaster and their CSR activities were conducted and examined in depth. Furthermore, triangulation of the qualitative data was achieved with quantitative data through a regression analysis.

Findings

It was found that most of the casinos’ activities were delivered in the forms of donations, rebuilding the community, supporting staffs and calling for volunteer work, thus largely targeting on the community and employees.

Practical implications

The study serves as a practical lesson for the casino operators to better plan and implement risk and reputational management and to better proliferate their socially responsible side of the gaming business to the public. It also helps casinos to ponder upon better crisis management methods so as to attain sustainability of the industry itself.

Social implications

The study explains the CSR activities of casinos, which are in a controversial industry, and attempts to explore why do they engage in CSR. It can be seen that the wrestle between social pressure and voluntarism will eventually institutionalize casinos and other controversial businesses in promoting more CSR in various aspects.

Originality/value

Combining some established institutional and socio-psychological theories, including the theory of planned behavior and the theory of regret regulation, the current work serves as an exploratory study to look into how and why Macau’s leading industry reacts in response to a natural disaster through CSR.