Corporate Citizenship

This book presents a step-by-step process aimed at helping you create the most successful business possible in the 21st century competitive landscape, empowering corporate citizenship professionals to accelerate their credibility within their company as an effective contributor who understands their company’s strategy and who creates value.

Over time, corporations have engaged in an aggressive campaign to dramatically enlarge their political and commercial speech and religious rights through strategic litigation and extensive lobbying. At the same time, many large firms have sought to limit their social responsibilities. For the most part, courts have willingly followed corporations down this path. But interestingly, corporations are meeting resistance from many quarters including from customers, investors, and lawmakers. Corporate Citizen? explores this resistance and offers reforms to support these new understandings of the corporation in contemporary society.

Looks at issues of corporate responsibility globally, at companies in developing countries facing important challenges within their own countries.

Current models of corporate citizenship largely consider business as one coherent entity. This view of business as a corporate force overlooks the growing evidence that most businesses are run by families. Family businesses are the most common form of business in existence – across countries, continents and geopolitical divides – and yet we know remarkably little about their approach to corporate citizenship. Where families run businesses, they create a concentration of family values that – for good or ill – influence the way business practices and behaviours develop. The role of the family in business has, therefore, an influence on the development of society that is partially mediated through corporate citizenship. This book pulls together current thinking from several diverse research fields that intersect with family business research to offer insight into current research and examples of practice for those studying and researching in the fields of family business, business values and corporate practice. The book will also explore the fact that family businesses tend to take a longer-term approach to business and that this is reflected in their behaviour towards the environment, community engagement, employee development and innovation. Bringing together contributions from researchers in the diverse fields of family business, philanthropy, community engagement, corporate social responsibility, innovation and policy, this book explores the many ways in which family businesses contribute to the corporate citizenship agenda.

A number of disparate but interconnected forces such as deregulation and globalization, rapid advances in communications technology and the rise in the power of the consumer and civil society have now combined to bring corporate responsibility to prominence in many corporate boardrooms. In this information age, the ramifications of not addressing best practice in environment, workplace, marketplace and community could range from bad press coverage to complete market exclusion. These are perilous times for the social construct of modern capitalism.In today's society successful companies will increasingly be those that recognize that they have responsibilities to a range of stakeholders that go beyond compliance with the law. If in the past the focus was on enhancing shareholder value, now it is on engaging stakeholders for long-term value creation. This does not mean that shareholders are not important, or that profitability is not vital to business success, but that in order to survive and be profitable a company must engage with a range of stakeholders whose views may vary greatly. If in the past corporate social responsibility was simply seen as profitability plus compliance plus philanthropy, now responsible corporate citizenship means companies being more aware of and understanding the societies in which they operate. This means senior executives and managers being able to deal with a wide range of issues including greater accountability, human rights abuses, sustainability strategies, corporate governance codes, workplace ethics, stakeholder consultation and management.The aim and scope of Perspectives on Corporate Citizenship is to help capture and distil these and other emerging trends in terms of content, context and processes, in one concise volume. With contributions from the *crème de la crème* of leading thinkers from around the world, Perspectives on Corporate Citizenship is essential reading for students, scholars and all serious thinkers on one of the most critical issues of our time.

This book discusses corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility and business ethics across Africa generally, and Botswana specifically. It begins by contextualizing Botswana within the broader context of Africa, using nine other countries – Angola, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – to provide a comparative perspective, examining the common factor: that weak legalization makes it challenging for corporate social responsibility to be actualized.From this background, the book then discusses Botswana as a key study. Botswana has been described as ‘Africa’s economic miracle’ due to its growing economy since independence This puts it in a unique position for the implementation and study of corporate social responsibility. The interdisciplinary team of authors employ various research methods to examine the complex relationship between business, society, corporations and social justice issues. This book will be valuable reading for any academic working on corporate social responsibility in Africa, and will present an interesting insight to an often neglected area of study. France Maphosa is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Botswana. His research interests include migration and transnationalism, the sociology of entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, urban and rural livelihoods, labour studies and alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Langtone Maunganidze is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. His research interests include industrial sociology, business and society, rural livelihoods and sustainable development, and entrepreneurship.

This special issue, devoted to Australasian perspectives, is timely in a debate in the region that is gaining momentum every day. Contributors to this issue are leading scholars in the field in Australia, New Zealand and India .

Given the increased impact of non-market forces on business reputation, there has never been a greater need to grasp corporate social performance. This book demonstrates that a holistic perspective on corporate citizenship that accommodates the importance of profits and other time-honored social values is both desirable and possible.