NGO-Business Partnerships: A Strategic Way of Performing Corporate Social Responsibility?
Abstract: One of the most recent trends among Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) researchers is to study NGO-Business Partnerships. This type of cross-sectoral alliance is promoted as a way to manifest a CSR commitment as concrete actions, improving environmental and social problems in society. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate to what extent strategic partnership between corporations in Sweden and NGOs existed, how strategic they were, and to find what reasons could explain these engagements. The purpose was fulfilled through the conduction of a national survey, sent to CSR managers at the 203 largest corporations in Sweden. 69 corporations responded, and out of those 26 claimed to have partnerships with NGOs. When the survey data was quantitatively analyzed, we found that the main reason to involve in a partnership is competitive pressure. Another probable reason is the personal engagement of managers. Nevertheless, the low response rate of the survey disappointed us, and in addition, we suspected that few of the partnerships were strategic. Therefore, we expanded the research to also include phone calls and grading of the corporations’ homepages. As a result of these assessments, we estimate that only 5 to 9 percent of the corporations in Sweden have strategic partnerships. An additional result from our expanded research is that approximately 40 percent of the corporations in Sweden to some extent are engaged in CSR. The low response rate limited the results that could be drawn from the quantitative analysis and eventually made us apply institutional theories as well. This additional analysis further helped us to explain why corporations engage in partnerships and CSR. Interestingly enough, institutional theory in part led us in the same direction as our quantitative analysis. We found that legitimacy and CSR are interconnected, and that external pressure was an important reason. In the end, we ended up with three plausible reasons for corporate engagement: competitive pressure, the personal engagement of managers, and external pressure.
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