Keeping at Arm’s Length or Searching for Social Proximity? Corporate Social Responsibility as a Reciprocal Process Between Small Businesses and the Local Community

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and locality in the small business context. This issue is addressed by studying the interplay between small businesses and local community based on the embeddedness literature and using the concept of social proximity. On the basis of 25 thematic interviews with owner-managers a typology is constructed which illustrates the owner-managers' perceptions of the relationship between the business and the local community. The findings emphasize the importance of reciprocity as it is suggested that corporate social responsibility in relation to locality is constructed as a response to the interpretations of reciprocal community support between small business owner-managers and local community.

Social Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics: Does Social Equal Ethical?

“…This also complements work in the ethics and small business field, which draws out the aspect of proximity in moral intensity as especially important (Lähdesmäki and Suutari 2012). Smith, Cannatelli & Kistruck develop a model of scaling social impact which suggests that the entrepreneurs desire for control, moral intensity and the organizational mode of scaling positively influence the scaling of social impact.…”

Small Business Social Responsibility

“…Mitchell, Agle, and Wood's (1997) formulation of stakeholder salience as comprising power (coercive/utilitarian/normative), legitimacy, and urgency (temporality and criticality) remains largely intact despite critique and analysis (e.g., de Bakker & den Hond, 2008). Proximity, which has been found to be important to CSR in small firms (Courrent & Gundolf, 2009;Lähdesmäki & Suutari, 2012;Spence, 2004), is not fully accounted for by extant stakeholder salience theory (Sen & Cowley, 2013). In particular, it is proposed that proximity is influential in terms of urgency.…”

Sustainability in the Face of Institutional Adversity: Market Turbulence, Network Embeddedness, and Innovative Orientation

“…A knowledge deficiency may be particularly challenging when limited institutional support exists for sustainable practices (Du and Vieira, 2012;Hoffman et al, 2002). Accordingly, we investigate how a firm's network embeddedness (Giuliani, 2013;Lahdesmaki and Suutari, 2012) may function as a critical mechanism through which market turbulence in adverse institutional contexts influences the strategic choice to adopt sustainable practices, as well as how this mediation might be invigorated by the firm's innovative orientation (Maltz et al, 2006;Mariadoss et al 2011). Previous research acknowledges that competitive market characteristics can help firms overcome a lack of institutional support for sustainability (Cohen and Winn, 2007;Dean and McMullen 2007;Du et al, 2011) but does not specify how and when a firm might be best positioned to leverage turbulent market conditions into sustainable behaviors.…”