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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 1

Publication Date: January 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.101.13793. Lang, J. C. (2023). The Common Good: Collaborative Corporate Citizenship. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, Vol -

10(1). 510-527.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

The Common Good: Collaborative Corporate Citizenship

Josephine Chinying Lang

S3-B2B-65, Nanyang Business School

Nanyang Technological University

Nanyang Avenue Singapore

ABSTRACT

I propose a model of emergent collaborative corporate citizenship (CCC) in which

organizations jointly develop dynamic capabilities to address social and

environmental concerns through collaborative sense-making and collaborative

actions. Using a complexity science framework, I describe how the system

conditions of organizational diversity and an economy of interdependence enhance

the capability for organizing around responses to social and environmental

imperatives. Inter-organizational collective actions magnify and intensify how

organizations modify their strategies to incorporate social and environmental

considerations. As organizations collaboratively modify their sense-making

mechanisms, amend their decision criteria, and adapt their operational routines to

incorporate social and environmental responsiveness, the larger business system

is thereby changed.

Keywords: Collaborative Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility,

Stakeholder Activism, the Common Good

Because it had no ownership in and control over its Asian suppliers, the footwear and apparel

leader, Nike, did not deem itself culpable for their labor practices. This was not, however, the

way the public saw it. In 1997, its sense-making transformed, Nike Chairman, Phil Knight, ended

the corporation’s relationship with four suppliers in Indonesia whose workplace conditions

had been shown to be unacceptable. Phil Knight’s rationale: “Good shoes come from good

factories and good factories have good labor relations” (Los Angeles Times, 1997).

When corporations respond to social, environmental, and communal concerns many benefits

accrue to individuals, groups, and organizations (Gardberg & Fombrun, 2006). Social deeds by

companies have been described variously as corporate social responsibility, corporate

citizenship, corporate philanthropy, and the triple bottom line.

Carroll (1979) emphasized four dimensions of corporate responsibilities, namely, economic,

legal, ethical, and philanthropic. Corporate citizenship, defined as voluntary corporate actions

undertaken to enhance or ameliorate the quality of our natural environment and the wellbeing

of our communities promotes sustainability (Etzioni, 1988; Wood, 1991). Waddock (2003) and

Barnett (2007) took a relational approach to corporate citizenship by emphasizing the

development of mutually beneficial relationships with multiple stakeholders and the

establishment of closer relationships with them through voluntary allocations of corporate

resources in improving their social welfare. Austin (2000) described a continuum of

commitment, starting from philanthropic, i.e., traditional acts of kindness through donations,

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Lang, J. C. (2023). The Common Good: Collaborative Corporate Citizenship. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, Vol - 10(1). 510-527.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.101.13793

to transactional, i.e., donations that focus on a specific domain such as a percentage of sale, to

integrative, i.e., efforts carried out with active participation of employees. Similarly, Mirvis and

Googins (2006) described five stages of corporate citizenship, namely, elementary, engaged,

innovative, integrated, and transforming. These stages portray a continuum from minimal

involvement to the deepening of commitment by incorporating corporate citizenship as an

integral part of business. Organizations that go beyond minimal engagement by committing

their expertise, strategic knowledge, and in-kind resources to acts of corporate citizenship tend

to reap more benefits, business-wise (Hess et al. 2002; Gardberg & Fombrun, 2006).

The Economist (2008) adopted an integrative approach to corporate citizenship, advocating a

management approach that comprehensively addresses economic, social, and environmental

impacts by going beyond acts of philanthropy and regulatory compliance. This notion is aligned

with the strategic approach to corporate citizenship, which views corporate citizenship as a

strategic management tool to achieve business results (Mirvis & Googins, 2006; Peloza, 2006).

Corporate citizenship is also intrinsically related to the notion of shared values, as raised by

Porter and Kramer (2011), emphasizing the reaping of profits that create societal benefits

through the good stewardship of resources.

In the literature on corporate citizenship, business is seen as a political actor. For Matten and

Crane (2005, p. 171), organizations have a part in the “enabling of citizens’ rights,” and

performing some functions related to security, which would extend the concept of corporate

citizenship. While acknowledging that the idea of the corporation as corporate citizen cannot

fully encompass what the political roles that business might play, Néron and Norman (2008)

propose viewing corporations as organizational members of the community that may be able

to influence political and legal processes to advance the common good, such as collaborating

with their competitors to improve voluntary standards of corporate conduct. Finnis (1999,

p155) defined the common good as “a set of conditions which enables members of a community

to attain for themselves reasonable objectives, or to realize reasonably for themselves the

value(s), for the sake of which they have reason to collaborate with each other (positively

and/or negatively) in a community.”

In regard to the moral basis upon which corporations act, Pies, Beckmann, and Hielscher,

(2009) suggest an ordonomic framework with regard to the social structure and semantics of

such action. Corporations may take on two ordo-responsibilities, viz., first, governance

responsibility to enhance the rules of the game through individual and collective self-binding

commitments and, secondly, discourse responsibility to begin multi-stakeholder discourse to

identify shared rule-interests.

Nowadays the social acceptability of businesses as political actors has become a function of

moral legitimacy, according to Palazzo and Scherer (2006), which may be construed as “a

conscious moral judgment on the corporation’s products, organizational structures, processes,

and leaders.” (Baumann-Pauly and Scherer, 2013, p. 3). To establish moral legitimacy, one

obvious necessity is public discourse by which a corporation can defend its decisions and

actions, which may be assessed based on commitment, structural and procedural execution,

and the extent of interaction for corporate citizenship (Baumann-Pauly and Scherer, 2013).

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Proposing a new self-conception of the corporate citizen, Aßlände and Curbach, (2014)

advocated a change from one that focuses on a corporation’s business interests within the

confines of national and international regulations (which they call ‘corporate bourgeois’) to one

(which they call ‘corporate citoyens’) that exercises its political rights and engages in social

activities that serve to promote and advance civic rights, and human rights, thus fulfilling the

responsibility to work for the common good.

However, does it actually benefit organizations to engage in corporate citizenship activities?

Corporate citizenship benefits the organizations that are involved. A study on a sample of U.S.-

based MNEs by Dowell et al. (2000) found that firms that adopted a single stringent global

environmental standard had much higher market values as measured by Tobin’s q (market

value over replacing costs of tangible assets) than firms that defaulted to less stringent or

poorly enforced host country standards. Further, such virtuous behaviors seem to have a

positive impact on organizational performance, promote positive spirals of proactive and

voluntary corporate behavior, and build a favorable corporate reputation that shields off

reputational losses in unforeseen crises (Flammer, 2013a). Moreover, a favorable pre-crisis

reputation can also protect organizations from negative publicity and allegations in a crisis

(Claeys and Cauberghe, 2015).

Surveys of CEOs revealed that they generally perceived CSR efforts as boosting their

corporations’ competitiveness and ensuring future success (Lacy et al. 2010, Haanaes et al.

2012). A meta-analysis of research studying the relationship between CSR and corporate

financial performance has found the relationship to be positive (Margolis et al. 2003). The

adoption of close-call CSR proposals was found to enhance performance (Flammer, 2013b).

These proposals tended to address employee satisfaction, mitigate environmental hazards,

relate directly to corporate performance, or operate within industries that are sensitive to

stakeholder demands.

The literature on corporate citizenship often considers corporate action as a sociopolitical

process, where the focus is on organizational actions taken in response to environmental and

social issues. But this leaves significant gaps in our understanding of corporate citizenship and

a question remains. How do corporations develop the capacity for collaborative action in this

area?

Social and environmental challenges are complex and can be crosscutting in nature; they may

cut across and straddle several disciplines. This means then that multiple parties with different

capabilities collaborating and acting in concert are needed to deal with such challenges. The

parties that may have to be involved could include government agencies, non-governmental

organizations (NGOs), industry associations, as well as business corporations from diverse

industries.

I suggest a model of emergent collaborative corporate citizenship (CCC) in which organizations

develop the capacity to jointly respond to emerging social and environmental imperatives.

Complexity science (Anderson, 1999; McDaniel, 2007) suggests that emerging social and

environmental imperatives may disequilibrate organizations, motivating them to self-organize

to re-establish equilibrium (Chiles et al. 2004). Under a set of conditions, organizations can self- organize to advance collaborative corporate citizenship behavior by integrating social and