Published Article / Although much work has been done on the society versus business relation issue, it has yet to cascade business social responsibility (BSR) to small ventures and especially rurally based ones where survival is a more pertinent goal. Most studies to date have focused on corporate and large organisations, thereby suggesting that BSR is not really a small business issue. A major consequence / cause of this apparent bias towards large business is limited research into how small ventures and especially rural ones perceive and apply BSR. This study proposes an instrument for measuring BSR in small ventures. Through empirical analysis the resultant instrument was found to be valid for measuring small business BSR and measured four dimensions thereof namely : Expected benefits; Community / customer practices; Realised / actual benefits, BSR awareness / attitude and employee practices. Through discriminant analysis, the identified factors of BSR are useful to classify ventures as high or low sales and profit performers, suggesting that information on a firm's BSR activities can be used as indicators of firm performance.

Referring to the Corporate Citizenship responsibility from the consumers perspective, consumers should be informed about Corporate Citizenship responsibility actions in order to educate them and make them more sensitive towards the dynamic role they are given.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has an ever-increasing role in the way commercial businesses operate. Team sport organisations are not immune to this trend. CSR is a strategic issue for sport organisations, with professional teams across a range of sports and national contexts now modifying their organisational structure by establishing charitable foundations tasked with delivering their CSR content. These structural changes inevitably bring in new organisational actors who, in varying degrees, influence ̀the actual implementation of CSR in the professional sports team context. Organisational complexity is therefore increasing regarding CSR, as is the need to capture its elements at both cross-organisational and individual levels. This is especially important given that, unlike mainstream (corporate) foundations that deal directly with a ‘parent’ company, professional sport leagues often mandate the implementation of CSR through central funding mechanisms. This in turn emphasises the intricacy of the process and the dynamics amongst organisational actors at various levels. To date, no studies have attempted to address this complexity. The present thesis aims to help fill the gap by examining the managerial decision-making process in the organisational context of charitable foundations established by English professional football clubs. The current study employs a grounded theory methodology as it aims to develop a substantive theory of how managers responsible for the formulation and implementation of CSR-related programmes in English football make professional decisions. The research utilises the Straussian variant of grounded theory, which accepts that humans shape their institutions as much as institutions shape people. The study also seeks cognitive similarity, a concept that implies some form of similar attribution of meaning, understanding or interpretation amongst individuals in multiple organisations. Although its purpose was to develop an individual-based substantive theory grounded in the way managers make decisions regarding CSR, throughout the focus has been on decision-making itself rather than on the individuals who facilitate this process. The study is populated with the top two divisions of English football and employs two data collection techniques: organisational documents and semi-structured interviews. The fieldwork took place in three different phases, with the first ̀consisting of two sub-phases. Phase 1a emphasised the analysis of organisational documents (a total of 25 documents from 16 football organisations), while the following phases of the fieldwork were based on constant comparative data analysis from 32 interviews. The theoretical framework that emerged from this study is one of assessable transcendence; in a conceptually abstract fashion, ‘assessable transcendence’ concerns a process that, fortified ̀by passion, contingent on trust, sustained by communication and substantiated by factual performance, enables the formulation and implementation of CSR-related programmes in this context. The social process that emerged from this study, therefore, consists of an intrinsic (that is, passion) and an extrinsic (that is, trust) stimulus, both of which are central components of the micro-social process transcending. These two stimuli, however, require the support of both internal and external communication (abstractly expressed through the micro-social process manoeuvring), and thus all three together form a ‘coalition’ which can enhance both business and social performance (largely expressed by the first ̀two micro-social processes, namely safeguarding and harmonising). Accordingly, two interrelated aspects of the decision-making process constitute a common thread in this research: (a) the recognition that social consciousness stimulates the process of assessable transcendence in an indispensable and limitless way, and (b) an understanding that transcendence cannot occur without either continuous achievement or the dissemination of concrete ‘CSR impact’ in social and business forms alike (hence assessable). The significance of this doctoral thesis for the sport management literature is four-fold. First, it focuses on the individual level of analysis, thereby offering a framework that explains the decision-making of those individuals responsible for the application of CSR in professional team sport organisations. By doing so, it bridges the micro/macro divide by integrating the micro-domain’s focus on individuals (i.e., foundation managers) with those of the meso- and macro- domains. Second, it moves away from mono-theoretical approaches that have been mainly used for the examination of CSR in the sporting context. By doing so, it illustrates that different, and often opposing, theoretical approaches may be needed in order to fully capture and theoretically explain the way in which the CSR practice occurs. Third, it shifts the focus of scholarly activity away from CSR content-based research towards more process-oriented approaches. CSR content research does little to explain how professional teams achieve and maintain such positioning through deliberate and trial-and-error CSR actions initiated by the individuals therein. Fourth, an in relation to the previous point, it employs a process-oriented methodology (namely, grounded theory) whose utilisation in sport management research has been either non-existent or a ‘pick and mix’ practice. By doing so, the current thesis responds to calls for internal consistency and methodological coherence, thereby adding to the limited number of studies that have utilised this methodology in a rounded manner. The theoretical framework presented in this dissertation has emerged from exploratory study. As such, the four micro-social processes, their associative meanings and, more importantly, the four principal concepts that hold assessable transcendence are regarded as tentative and require substantiation through further research. To this end, a number of research propositions are offered that can serve as a starting point towards a continued exploration of those moderating and mediating factors on the formulation and implementation of CSR in team sport organisations.

This research studies the eight principles of sustainability applied in Project Management. To be more precise the research fulfils four objectives which are: firstly, to review and identify key principles of sustainability in project management from existing literature; secondly, to adopt a multiple case study method to assess the applicability of the principles in project management; thirdly, to determine the barriers that impede certain principles to be applied in projects and the resulting trade-offs; and lastly, to refine the concept of sustainability in project management.The study adopts a subjectivist ontological viewpoint and an interpretivist epistemological outlook. The paper deductively studies the research question and adopts a qualitative mono-method research design, with a multiple case study strategy. The project case studies analysed belong to six different industries namely Pharmaceutical, Information Technology (IT), Automotive, Transportation, Furniture and Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). All case studies fulfil the criteria of being multinational organisations, operating in the private sector, having sustainability as a strategic pillar and projects executed in developed countries with a similar macroeconomic climate. The data has been collected through the semi-structured interview technique and examined using a thematic analysis. The results show that not all eight principles of sustainability are implemented in project management despite of multiple proactive endeavours of engaging in social and environmentally focused business practices. The two principles that show a limited applicability in project management are values and ethics as well as consuming income and not capital.The theoretical contribution of the research is realised through the first collective analysis of the eight principles of sustainability and their implementation in project management through empirical case studies. An additional contribution is through the selection of case studies from industries that have not been examined before. The practical implication of the research is to offer guidance to organisations on what principles they need to build their sustainability project management practices on and to point out the commonly faced barriers and trade-offs.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2015. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In the last 15 years, growing public awareness of the negative impact of corporate activities has prompted big corporations in the mining, manufacturing and retail sectors to publish reports that communicate their awareness of environmental and social issues. These reports typically take the form of standalone corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports or integrated annual (IA) reports. The publication of these reports is not an isolated event or practice on behalf of each company; the structure and content of the reports are informed by stock exchange policies such as the King Code in South Africa, and reporting frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) on an international level. The nature of corporate social responsibility and CSR reporting has captured the interest of researchers in diverse disciplines. Scholars such as Jones (1995) and Pedersen (2006), working within business and marketing-related fields, have praised CSR reports as a “win-win” concept which encourages corporations to focus on both their financial and social performance. Conversely, scholars such as Banerjee (2003, 2007) and Redclift (2002, 2005) have criticised CSR for being a new form of “greenwashing” and a mechanism that promotes the continued dominance of financially strong institutions. Critical scholars typically adopt a neo-Marxist perspective of neoliberalism and assert that legitimate environmental protection or social transformation and equality cannot take place within the reigning economic paradigm (see Pepper 1984, 1996). This study is a contribution to applied linguistic research into CSR and IA reports, particularly those originating from the Global South. It draws on methods developed within critical discourse analysis (CDA), systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and corpus linguistics to investigate the 2011, 2012 and 2013 CSR and IA reports of six South African companies located in the mining, retail and food manufacturing industries. Drawing on Halliday’s (1978) three metafunctions of texts, Fairclough’s (1989, 2002) three dimensional framework, as well as the Appraisal Framework (White 2001; Martin and White 2005) this study investigates the textual, representational and interpersonal meanings of the selected reports as ones that represent a new, gradually conventionalised genre within modern corporate discourse. In summary, the study contributes to an understanding of CSR and IA reports in three ways: First, it highlights the significant role of the GRI in prescribing, and thus restricting, the structural and discursive features of CSR and IA reports. Second, the study shows how the six companies draw on a limited set of discourses in the reports which all, in some way or another, embed neoliberal ideologies. This suggests that the South African CSR and IA reports function to maintain an established, dominant ideological and discursive order. Third, the degree of reliability of the information in the reports is dependent on how the companies construct themselves in this report. In this regard, the analysis reveals that the companies use a limited set of linguistic resources to construct themselves as strategic, moral and responsible social actors. In a country marked by widespread social inequality and diminishing resources, the findings ultimately suggest that social transformation and environmental protection are unlikely to be achieved if the sustainability discourses of corporate institutions are not publically challenged.

Denna fallstudie berör Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) och den interna kommunikationen av CSR inom finanssektorn. De organisationer studien har applicerats på är Swedbank och Nordea där studien belyser kommunikation av CSR från central nivå till lokal och vise versa. Idag blir företag i större utsträckning än tidigare granskade inom områdena samhällsarbete och hållbarhetsfrågor. Swedbank och Nordea är två stora aktörer inom finanssektorn, en sektor som tidigare setts ha en mer indirekt påverkan än direkt, och verkar för att samhället ska fungera genom in- och utlåning. Den externa kommunikationen från organisationerna bygger på att den interna kommunikationen ska fungera och leda till ett utförande av det som utlovas på hemsidor, CSR-rapporter, hållbarhetspolicys etc. För att undersöka detta har en kvalitativ fallstudie genomförts med intervjuer genomförda på central, regional och lokal nivå inom de både organisationerna. De slutsatser studien kan dra är att de båda organisationerna följer ord till handling och har inkorporerat CSR i den dagliga verksamheten. Vi ser skillnader organisationerna emellan i den interna kommunikationen av CSR där Swedbank har kommit en längre bit på vägen än Nordea. Den försiktiga kommunikationen och en otydlig definition av CSR har lett till att Nordeas anställda har en bristande medvetenhet kring organisationens CSR-arbete. Detta skapar en inkonsistens mellan Nordeas ideologi att de anställda ska ha en medvetenhet kring Nordeas CSR arbete och deras faktiska kommunikation internt. Swedbank har även i detta avseende kommit längre, då de har förenklat definitionen av CSR genom att bryta ned begreppet till mer lättförståeliga delar för de anställda. Det kan ännu diskuteras om CSR har blivit en institutionaliserad norm inom finanssektorn.

Syftet med denna studie är att kartlägga i vilken omfattning samhällsansvar är en del av språkreseföretags verksamhet. Studien är baserad på intervjuer med personer i ledande position inom tre språkreseföretag som finns representerade i Sverige. Den teoretiska referensramen består av ett antal kategorier som är baserade på tidigare forskning om ”Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR) inom olika typer av turismföretag. Dessa kategorier är ekonomisk, miljömässig och social hållbarhet samt drivkrafter och hinder för turismföretags arbete med samhällsansvar. Studien visar att omfattningen av samhällsansvar inom språkresebranschen är varierande. Företagens roll som enbart mellanhand verkar i många fall påverka omfattningen negativt. I studien framkommer även att det finns uppfattningar om att engagemanget för samhällsansvar i branschen och bland resenärerna är lågt. Att ha uttryckliga policies och riktlinjer kring samhällsansvar verkar inte vara en självklarhet för språkreseföretag. Däremot uppfyller alla deltagande företag vissa kriterier som ingår i att ta samhällsansvar. Detta arbete sker dock ibland omedvetet, det vill säga utan att företagen har vetskap om att aktiviteterna faller inom ramen för samhällsansvar.

The concept of sustainability has become a buzzword in today’s business marketplace. Particularly, the incorporation of sustainability into Supply Chain Management (SCM) has received a great deal of attention from companies of all sizes and even involved a wide range of industries in recent years. Meanwhile, Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) has been highlighted by academic and corporations. With SSCM, more enterprises have benefited from being sustainable in their daily operations. Although research has made contributions, there is still a lack of understanding on how to achieve sustainable development in SCM. Therefore, the overall purpose of this research is to find out the key success factors for implementing the strategic SSCM. To achieve this target, it is necessary to identify appropriate indicators to measure the sustainable activities and figure out the relationship that combined social and environmental dimensions with supply chain activities. This research focused on Swedish global company. Both summaries of literature review and findings of the case company were analyzed to satisfy the research purpose, as a result, definition of sustainability, implementations in SSCM, and the relationship between sustainability and SCM that are based on the actual situations of the case company were presented. After that, five key success factors for implementing the strategic SSCM have been concluded: (1) SSCM needs to be ensured as a strategy within long-term consideration; (2) Standard management system needs to be complied with daily operations; (3) Communication with stakeholders needs to be increased in the supply chain; (4) Respect for human rights, and provide safety working environment; (5) Control resources usage and reduce negative emission to the environment. Accomplish of this research, on the one hand, it clarified the relationship between sustainability and SCM; on the other hand, it also deepened knowledge about how to achieve a strategic SSCM based on an empirical study in wire and cable manufacturing industry.

The growing importance of non-market considerations has led multinational corporations to globalize not just production and commercialization but also their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives as nonmarket strategies. Scholars have shown that CSR can create intangible assets that help companies reduce their foreignness and gain competitive advantages over local rivals. To what extent multinational enterprises (MNEs) can transfer CSR initiatives to other locations is an important question. Prior research, focusing on the transfer of operational initiative, is silent on the transfer of practices that extend beyond the boundaries of the firm to influence the welfare of external stakeholders. This study builds a theory about the conditions that influence success and failure in the transfer of CSR initiatives from headquarters to overseas subsidiaries. Through a case study of an Indian multinational, qualitative data is combined with the formal logic of fuzzy set analysis. The findings reveal that it is the combination of practice characteristics and local contexts that influence the success of practice transfer. Specifically, I explore two characteristics of CSR initiatives that facilitate practice transfer: stakeholder multiplicity and ambiguity. The former denotes the degree to which a CSR initiative can serve more than one stakeholder and the latter denotes the degree to which a CSR initiative can be applied to multiple contexts in different ways. The analysis suggests that stakeholder multiplicity is a predictor of transfer success to countries where coordination among diverse social actors is easy to achieve. In contrast, in high-context culture locations where rapid coordination is less easy to achieve, the ambiguity of CSR initiatives is a more important predictor of transfer success.

Beyond the conventional meaning of CSR as a voluntary obligation for enhancing the social, economic and environmental wellness of the society, the developmental-oriented CSR is emerging and requires exploratory and empirical investigations. This research attempts to fill the gap in this direction by examining the Entrepreneurship Development through Corporate Social Responsibility – A Study of the Nigerian Telecommunication Industry. In specific terms, the research seeks deeper understanding of CSR and Entrepreneurship with a view to refocusing both constructs as support mechanisms for small enterprise development in Nigeria. Considering the multidisciplinary nature of this research, an extensive review of literature was carried out which provided deeper insights into the research problem. Arising from the review of literature, the human capital theory and stakeholder theory provided the required theoretical grounding for the study. For easy triangulation, the study adopted a mixed research methods (an amalgam of qualitative and quantitative research methods). The target population for the study was the Nigerian telecommunication industry, which comprised the 24 telecommunication companies and the 65 million proxy telephone users. Lagos state was preferred as the sample location. From the target population, sample sizes of 9 telecommunication companies and 384 telephone users were selected with justifications using purposive sampling and snowballing sampling respectively. The qualitative aspect of research used interview instrument for data collection. The interview data from 9 interviewees were analysed using content and thematic analyses. The quantitative research on the other hand used web-enabled questionnaire instrument for data collection. Out of the 384 telephone users targeted, only 369 responses were analysed, using descriptive and inferential statistics (Chi-Square Test, Friedman Rank Test, Structural Equation Modelling and Multiple Linear Regression Analysis). At end of the investigation, it was found that the stakeholders’ perception of CSR is largely a philanthropic perspective; while the perception of entrepreneurship in the same industry is the act of setting up businesses for self-employment and wealth creation. Furthermore, the dominant CSR activity is sports and entertainments, while entrepreneurship development was poorly supported. With regards to the potentials, the study found that CSR is a potential means for funding entrepreneurship education; funding start-up venture capital for unemployed graduates/trainees; funding business clusters and technology business incubation centres for small businesses; funding purchase of equipment and tools for poor artisans, craftsmen and petty traders in disadvantaged host communities; and also CSR could be an effective instrument for political risk mitigation in hostile communities like Niger-Delta and Northern Nigeria. Finally, it was found that there is a relationship between CSR and entrepreneurship in the Nigerian telecommunication industry, but the predictability of CSR dimensions on entrepreneurship is weak. The study has therefore enriched the literature with an enhanced understanding of CSR incorporating entrepreneurship, as opposed to viewing CSR in terms of social, economic and environmental dimensions. The study concludes with a discussion of the academic and practical implications of the findings as well as recommendations for further research in this multidisciplinary field.