Abstract: The issue of social responsibility of SMEs in China is becoming increasingly grim. The studies made by scholars on this issue are mostly unfolded from a single level of individuals, enterprises or the external environment, lacking of the related studies of the institutional factors and government interventions. This issue of SMEs’ social responsibility has also been generally attributed to the operators for lacking of morality. This paper tries to explore the moral and non-moral roots of SMEs’ lacking of social responsibility from the three-dimensional perspective of individuals, enterprises and the external environment. The results show that the root cause of SMEs’ lacking of social responsibility does not lie in moral failure of the operators. From the perspective of the resource-based theory and the background-dependent theory, the non-moral reasons for SMEs’ lacking of social responsibility are the constraints on enterprise resource capacity and the failure of social control. However, compared to large enterprises, SMEs are under more standardized government regulation.

Key words: SMEs; corporate social responsibility; operators’ morality; resource capacity