The transformed identity of a banking corporation's employees, 1960s-1980s

Abstract

The current paper discusses one aspect of corporate social responsibility-employee community volunteering-as implemented at an Israeli banking corporation. The literature on corporate social responsibility as a feature of global capitalism has largely ignored the history of corporate philanthropy and its relation to the current model of social responsibility. Moreover, to date, no studies have addressed the relationship between models of corporate social responsibility, on the one hand, and management approaches, on the other. In this historical-ethnographic study, we examine a case in which, we argue, normative management models and advanced marketing approaches combined to shape new conceptions and practices of employee volunteering. We examine how the process evolved over the course of three marketing campaigns initiated by the bank's management between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. In the early 1960s, the models in question helped refashion the employees' identity as service providers 'empathic' toward clients. By the late 1970s, their identity was transformed once again, this time to incorporate a 'humane' orientation toward the 'community'. In the process-the results of which are still felt today-the employees became the carriers and disseminators of an organizational culture that emphasized values of philanthropy and social commitment. 1 This paper relies on a historical-ethnographic case study (conducted between 2006 and 2008) focusing on the philanthropic behavior of the bank's owners and employees from 1935 to the present day. Data were gathered using observations and semi-structured interviews with the bank's employees, executives, and other key figures, both current and retired, past and present. To give our historical analysis more depth, we systemically analyzed archive materials, specifically over a hundred bank bulletins published by the bank's management from the early 1960s onwards.

Settling the Neoliberal Contradiction through Corporate Volunteering: Governing Employees in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism

“…In this context, evidence of corporate support in volunteering could be traced back to the United States of the early twentieth century (Basil et al 2009), while programs of corporate volunteering existed during the 1960s also in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Venezuela (Kaplan and Kinderman 2017), and Israel (Galia 2015). However, a major emergence of corporate volunteering as a proliferating field of corporate activity, state promotion and public interest can be traced only around the turn of the millennium: in the United Kingdom and the United States, the number of companies that offer corporate volunteering schemes significantly grew from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s (Brudney and Gazley 2006; Low et al 2007); in Europe, EU institutions have promoted corporate volunteering during the 2000s through favorable resolutions and communications (Fundacion Codespa and European Volunteer Centre 2014) and through cofunding an ‘employee volunteering award’ as part of the European Year of Volunteering 2011 (BITC 2011); and in Israel, the globalizing trend of CSR and corporate volunteering was ‘imported’ to the local context since the late 1990s by local offices of multinational corporations as well as intermediary nonprofit organizations, funded by Jewish philanthropic institutions and corporate foundations (Barkay 2008; Aharoni 2016; Kay 2018).…”