Corporate Social Responsibility in Family Business: A Perspective of Mexico

IntroductionRecently, in the literature, the number of researchers, academics and professionals in business science and management that have been analyzed and discussed, through theoretical studies and empirical, the impac t of family businesses in different activities and operation of businesses, has increased; among their investigations on social responsibility (Dyer, 2006). Therefore, it is more often to find in the literature published papers comparing the performance between family enterprises and non-relatives, through the return of investments (Anderson & Reeb, 2003), sales growth (Daily & Dollinger, 1992; Gallo, Tapies & Cappuyns, 2000; Chrisman, Chua & Litz, 2004), job satisfaction (Beehr, Drexler & Faulkner, 1997), innovation (Tanewski, Prajogo & Sohal, 2003) and lately, social responsibility (Deniz & Cabrera, 2005; Dyer & Whetten, 2006). While only a few theoretical and empirical studies that analyze social responsibility in family businesses have been published, there are strong positions found among researchers and academics if truly families small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) implement social responsibility activities (Dyer & Whetten, 2006). For this reason, Morck and Yeung (2004) concluded that family businesses are commonly very interested in protecting their interests; in the best possible way, families who have several companies usually do not have much interest in supporting social activities of philanthropy. Moreover, there is much corruption in this type of companies and usually do not to provide real information to government authorities to protect their interests (Dyer & Whetten, 2006). On the other hand, there are other researchers and academics, for instance Godfrey (2005), who believe that family businesses have a series of incentives so that they can be socially responsible, such as maintaining a good image with customers and consumers and therefore preserve a positive reputation with its suppliers, which can generate social protection not only for the company, but for the same family in crisis times. In addition, this kind of family SMEs have a high importance in society and economy any country (Gersick, Davis, McCollom & Lansberg, 1977; Neubauer & Lank, 1998; Dyer, 2003; Chua, Chrisman & Steier, 2003), since they represent around 60% of the total number of enterprises and provide a little more than 60% of the gross national product (Deniz & Cabrera, 2005). Despite the importance that family SMEs have, there are relatively few theoretical and empirical studies that analyze the nature and operation of such organizations, even though this kind of companies are considered relevant in terms of the behavior caused by an interrelationship between the family and the business system (Gersick et al., 1997; Chau, Chrisman & Sharma, 1999). Therefore it is necessary to perform a greater number of studies that consider the family as a basic variable that will help to build a more robust theory, which can be generalized to larger organizations' sector: family b usinesses (Dyer, 2003). Besides, a greater investigation is missing on which the different types of behaviors among family companies can be identified, including social responsibility (Deniz & Cabrera, 2005). In this context, the main contribution of this empirical study is the analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in family enterprises in an emerging country, as it is the case of Mexico. Another contribution is the methodology used, since a structural equations model will be used to test the proposed theoretical model. The rest of the work has been organized in the following manner; the second section presents the theoretical framework, the few empirical studies previously performed and raised the research hypothesis; the third section describes the methodology employed, sample, and used variables. The fourth section discusses results and, finally, fifth section presents the main conclusions and discussion of the work. …