The gift that keeps on giving: corporate giving and excessive risk-taking

Corporations have recently started incorporating employees’ prosocial preferences into their incentive schemes, including charitable donations (corporate giving). These donations are mainly discussed in conjunction with the external effects of a firm’s CSR strategy. However, this experiment examines the effect of donations on internal firm operations. Specifically, we investigate whether the presence and structure of corporate giving influences employees’ excessive risk-taking. Such prosocial activities may remediate misaligned incentives often cited as drivers for employees to take excessive risks. Contrary to widespread practice, our experimental evidence suggests that firms could constrain employees' excessive risk-taking by linking existing contributions to project rather than corporate performance, thus providing boundaries around an employee’s involvement in CSR initiatives. We identify project-level giving as an unexplored CSR benefit and infer that personal responsibility effectively changes an employee’s incentive package. Our findings suggest an inverted U-shape curve of effectiveness.

The Moral Relationality of Professionalism Discourses: The Case of Corporate Social Responsibility Practitioners in South Korea

Building a coherent discourse on professionalism is a challenge for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as there is not yet an established knowledge basis for CSR, and CSR is a contested notion that covers a wide variety of issues and moral foundations. Relying on insights from the literature on micro-CSR, new professionalism, and Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991/2006) economies of worth framework, we examine the discourses of 56 CSR practitioners in South Korea on their claimed professionalism. Our analysis delineates four distinct discourses of CSR professionalism— strategic corporate giving, social innovation, risk management, and sustainability transition—that are derived from a plurality of more or less compatible moral foundations whose partial overlaps and tensions we document in a systematic manner. Our results portray these practitioners as compromise makers who selectively combine morally distant justifications to build their own specific professionalism discourse, with the aim to advance CSR within and across organizations. By uncovering the moral relationality connecting these discourses, our findings show that moral pluralism is a double-edged sword that can not only bolster the justification of CSR professionalism but also threaten collective professionalism at the field level. Overall, our study suggests paying more attention to the moral relationality and tensions that underlie professional fields.

Striking a Strategic Balance: Enhancing Corporate Philanthropy through Service Learning

Corporate giving is increasingly important to the nonprofit sector. However, corporate philanthropy has been slow to adopt insights from the sector’s decades-long experimentation with strategic philanthropy. This article explores the question of how corporate philanthropy might leverage service learning partnerships with students in university-based nonprofit education programs to enhance strategy and maximize social impact. We propose a model for strategic corporate philanthropy comprising two axes, on which the corporation can gauge whether its giving is more proactive or reactive, and technocratic or humanistic, to find a balance between strategy and rigidity. Qualitative data were collected from a service learning project between Toyota Motor North America, Master of Public Administration (MPA) students at a Texas university, and residents of an economically challenged area of West Dallas. Findings suggest that service learning partnerships can help corporate philanthropists strike an appropriate strategic balance, whereby the corporation, individuals being served, and students all benefit.

Fitness Philanthropy: Exploring a Movement at the Nexus of Leisure, Charity, and Events

Sport is increasingly being used by individuals, charities, and corporate sponsors as a means of acquiring donors and fundraisers to support a variety of social and health causes. This paper examines five key features of fitness philanthropy that when considered together provide new sociological insight into a unique social phenomenon. These are: (a) peer-to-peer giving, (b) social media accounts of embodied philanthropy, (c) community connection and making a difference, (d) fitness philanthropy as social capital, and (e) charity and corporate giving. The significance of the paper is threefold. First, it highlights the ways in which fitness philanthropy points to the changing nature of sport, leisure, and physical activity, whereby fundraising is a key motivation for participation. Second, it examines the types of “empathy paths” created by fitness philanthropy with its emphasis on the body, social media, and peer-to-peer forms of organizational giving. Third, the paper seeks to answer critical questions about fitness philanthropy in the context of neoliberalism and “caring capitalism.” Bringing these themes into dialogue with broader research on the intersections between sport and charity adds to the body of sociological research on sport, philanthropy, well-being, and civic engagement by addressing novel conceptual frameworks for the embodied expression of these concerns.