Helping a Small Family Business Firm Become Socially Responsible

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to address a gap in the literature regarding the adoption of Social Responsibility (SR) in small businesses and its impact on overall performance. This issue comes from that most of the research has been undertaken in big firms and the subsequent results applied to small businesses. This is a major drawback since the dynamics in large companies and sometimes huge multinationals differ from the ones of small businesses which mostly focus on income. Family businesses find themselves at loggerheads with their stakeholders in an attempt to be socially responsible as they perceive the act as additional expenses. We argue small businesses have to rethink and invent new ways of being socially responsible for operating in a threatening environment. This paper relates an intervention research procedure based on the Socio-Economic Approach to Management (Savall, 1976) which applied management tools aiming to internally reduce dysfunctions and externally reach strategic objectives. The effect of the intervention research on socially responsible activities of small business firms and the results towards stakeholders are detailed emphasizing the increase in administrative personnel's efficiency and productivity towards stakeholders.