Purpose

Based on the perspective of stakeholders, this paper aims to construct the corporate social responsibility (CSR) evaluation system, aiming at encouraging enterprises to actively undertake social responsibility, formulating targeted countermeasures to improve the performance level of social responsibility and realizing its sustainable development.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses data from 2014 to 2018 of pharmaceutical companies in China to estimate the CSR system. Based on the analytic hierarchy process, the coefficient of variation uses to determine the weight of each index. Moreover, the cloud model uses for empirical evaluation.

Findings

The results reveal that social responsibility evaluation of pharmaceutical companies is poor to average to good and it maintains a good development trend. The order of the weight of corporate stakeholders is shareholders, employees, consumers, creditors, suppliers and government. The importance of internal stakeholders is higher than that of external stakeholders. The comprehensive cloud evaluation value of the social responsibility evaluation of pharmaceutical companies are “ordinary,” and the effect of comprehensive social responsibility performance is not good.

Originality/value

The current study not only considers the uncertainty of the concept of CSR but also reflects the connection between the randomness of pharmaceutical companies and the ambiguity of CSR. Moreover, this study develops a three-dimensional evaluation of “enterprise-year-indicator” by studying the data of multiple companies in different years. In terms of the modeling concept, the two-way cognition between the connotation and conceptual extension of the cloud model is fully used to realize the uncertainty mapping between the evaluation set and the indicator set.