When Suits Meet Roots: The Antecedents and Consequences of Community Engagement Strategy

Abstract

citizens, community engagement, community groups, corporate philanthropy, social partnerships, social strategy, stakeholder engagement, systematic review,

Antecedents to transformational community engagement in South Africa

“…Lee & Newby define community as a group of citizens drawn together by shared geography, interaction or identity (as cited in Bowen et al, 2010). This research focuses on the geographical community affected by a company owing to their proximity to its operations and specifically the geographic communities in which there is additional interaction with the company operations.…”

“…Communities are key stakeholders and community engagement is a crucial component of stakeholder relations management, contributing as it does to the effectiveness of CSR (Bowen, 2007). Bowen et al (2010) outline a continuum of strategies that could be employed in community engagement, including transactional, transitional and transformational community engagement. At one end of the continuum is the most commonly-practised, philanthropically-based transactional engagement.…”

“…Further, there has been little research into how firms could engage communities in transformational ways (Bowen, et al, 2010;Esteves & Barclay, 2011). This may be partly owing to the pressure to 'publish or perish', whereby getting good data on transformational engagement requires in-depth studies which are lengthier than studies on transactional or transitional engagement.…”

“…It builds on the theoretical work of Bowen et al (2010), with particular emphasis on the importance of the national context and the legal drivers of community engagement. Many of the findings here focus on the relationship interface between firms and communities.…”

“…While Bowen, Newenham-Kahindi and Herremans (2010) have found that community engagement strategies fall into the transactional, transitional and transformational categories, more research is needed. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with CSR practitioners, community beneficiaries and external experts across three companies from different sectors and geographically-associated South African communities.…”