Corporate Community Involvement Activities: New Evidence for Turkey

Recognition that corporations are embedded within societies is playing an increasingly significant role in shaping strategic decision making in modern business organisations. Corporate community involvement (CCI) is becoming an increasingly salient aspect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and encompasses a diverse range of activities from philanthropic giving and employee volunteerism to cause related marketing and sponsorship, and supports a range of community needs from education and welfare to cultural and artistic development. As such it provides an ideal focus for exploring the economic, strategic, cultural and institutional influences on CCI. This thesis presents the first systematic analysis of CCI behaviours in Turkey. Turkey, as a secular, developing, largely Moslem country with a growing economy, provides a comparative research context that is culturally, economically and institutionally distinct from other environments within which CCI has been studied. A conceptual model has been developed based on the application of the behavioural theory of the firm. The model engenders the studies which aim to explain the situation of CCI in an institutional, cultural, and national context and through the CCI model, it is expected that the multicultural and complex characteristics of the CCI phenomenon can be understood. The findings suggest that shareholder/investors and community groups positively affect the companies in taking the decision to engage in CCI. The documented relationship between CCI, ownership type, and other firm characteristics also had important implications. This study finds that larger firms are more likely and smaller firms less likely to become involved in CCI activities. Local Turkish companies are keener to contribute large amounts in corporate giving than foreign ones. There is a strong orientation of CCI in Turkey to projects concerned with education, healthcare and the arts. The three common exclusions are politics, religion and animal rights. The majority of CCI expenditures in Turkey took the form of sponsorships. Engaging in CCI under a CSR department is not thepreferred choice in Turkey usually the companies wants to engage in their CCI activities under other business functions. The companies generally separate their philanthropic and sponsorhip activities from each other. Key types of CCI such as employee volunteerism, cash resources or gifts-in-kind, are undertaken under the auspices of these philantrophy and sponsorship and considered to be resources allocated to engage in these types of CCI. This thesis fills the gaps in the existing literature with respect to the lack of conceptual and empirical studies about the necessity of investigating the topic of CCI from a holistic perspective; the necessity of application of other theory(ies) which are able to describe the whole CCI situation instead of describing it piecemeal, and the necessity of discovering different institutional contexts because existing research is geographically narrowly drawn and usually concentrated in the U.S and Western Europe. The thesis is structured to fill these gaps and the contributions are made based on the lacks of the existing studies on CCI.