CSR by means relationships among cooperatives, capitalist firms and non-profit organizations: experiences recovering food

TOPIC 9 – STAGE 3 - MESO Key Words: food and agriculture sector; donations; feeding; CSR memories; content analysis; in-depth semi-structured interviews; cooperatives; capitalist firms; food banks. Many firms include the... [ view full abstract ]

TOPIC 9 – STAGE 3 - MESO

Key Words: food and agriculture sector; donations; feeding; CSR memories; content analysis; in-depth semi-structured interviews; cooperatives; capitalist firms; food banks.

Many firms include the CSR approach in their strategy to give answer to society demands beyond environmental issues. In particular, food banks are benefited by activities that allow certain firms to materialize this strategy. The business goals to take such way are diverse (merely social goals, market image improvement, tax saving…), but in all of them communication addressed to several stakeholders is important. Those goals may be different in cooperatives firms with regard to the capital based ones, since, in principle, the former are more natural trended to CSR.
The present research has analyzed the commitment to inform about their social activities of the 42 food and agriculture sector firms that collaborate with the Food Bank of Asturias (small autonomous region to the north of Spain) by means donating products. Among them, only 10 broadcast their annual corporate social responsibility reports, which have been studied with the content analysis technique. The results show special concern of these firms about the local communities where their commercial activity is developed. Nevertheless, the information they share on this matter is, in most of the cases, too general and poor; on one hand, the firms make more effort to show the final results of their activities than the motivations of these activities; on the other hand, the detail on entities and people that benefit from these activities is poor. Part of the detected lacks may be caused by the scarce use of international CSR management and communication standards to make the reports.
To contrast the former results and to find out on their reasons, several in-dept interviews have been conducted. Among other relevant aspects, an appreciable degree of CSR strategy integration, the importance of corporate volunteering, the exclusion of tax saving as a motivation, and the need of more coordination with the entities that they benefit have been found. In all of that, no remarkable differences between capitalist and cooperative firms have been reflected.