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Corporate Citizenship and Managerial Motivation: Implications for Business Legitimacy
Author(s) -
VIDAVERCOHEN DEBORAH,
BRØNN PEGGY SIMCIC
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
business and society review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.524
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 1467-8594
pISSN - 0045-3609
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8594.2008.00328.x
Subject(s) - legitimacy , citizenship , corporate social responsibility , context (archaeology) , public relations , face (sociological concept) , norwegian , political science , sociology , politics , social science , law , paleontology , linguistics , philosophy , biology
In 2000, Business and Society Review published a Special Issue of the journal to explore scholars’ ideas about how the practice of corporate citizenship would evolve in the 21st century. Contributors to the volume predicted a change in business motives for engaging in social initiatives, suggesting that managers would begin to see corporate citizenship as a strategic necessity to preserve organizational legitimacy in the face of changing social values. This article uses data from a study of corporate citizenship practices in over 500 Norwegian companies to explore the validity of the Special Issue predictions. We begin by reviewing the foundations of organizational legitimacy theory and examine recent research documenting the growing importance of corporate citizenship for assessments of business legitimacy. We describe our study methods, present our results, and discuss the implications of our findings in this context.