The conventional discourse on corporate social responsibility (CSR) focuses on big companies and tends to neglect small, medium, and family firms. However, scholars state that simply scaling down CSR theories does not capture the variations in CSR choices across companies and contexts. The authors remedy this state of affairs by investigating an Italian family firm in the animal feed industry in light of an integrative framework that combines institutional- and company-level factors explaining the variations in CSR choices. The findings highlight how the company under investigation is committed to ensuring animal welfare by offering healthy and safe animal feed through innovation and certification. In addition, the company is well embedded in the local community and represents a point of reference for the inhabitants. Initiatives ranging from scholarships to university exchange programs to running races contribute to mobilizing human resources and to improving the company's brand awareness.
TopIntroduction
Corporate Social Responsibility (heretofore also CSR) is a prominent topic in management practice, education, and research. Scholars have studied firms’ social concerns for many decades (Bowen, 1953; Davis, 1973; Cochran & Woods, 1984) but only recently the interest in corporate social responsibility has become common (Carroll, 1999; Crane & Matten, 2004). To date, the majority of CSR research is concerned with large companies with lower attention placed on small- and medium- sized enterprises (heretofore also SMEs) or family firms. Two possible reasons seem to justify this focus: that only large companies can afford being socially responsible and that they are the heart of the global economy (Jenkins, 2004). The assumption is that CSR theories could be simply scaled down to fit (Morsing & Perrini, 2004).
Over time, scholars have raised criticism and outlined that this logic is flawed (Davies & Crane, 2010). First, while large companies dominate the attention of academic and practitioners’ discourse for their contribution to the Gross National Products, it has been increasingly recognized that SMEs and among those, family companies, constitute the fabric of the economic system in several countries (Family Firm Institute, 2017). Second, and more importantly, scholars acknowledge that SMEs and family companies pursue idiosyncratic paths toward the development of CSR program, which is often a means to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (Jenkins, 2009). Size and family values deeply influence the CSR choices and this means that findings about large companies are not generalizable to small and medium family ones (Davies & Crane, 2010). This makes timely to investigate CSR in family SMEs. We contribute to remedy this state of affairs by offering insights from a case study of a small family company located in Southern Italy. The company manufactures animal feed products and contributes to make the food we buy at stores safe and healthy by providing safe and healthy animal food products, an important concern for consumers after recent several crises, such as the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).
The chapter is organized as follows. Next we discuss CSR choices for SMEs in different institutional settings. Then we propose a conceptual framework that draws on and elaborates upon Baumgartner’s (2014) work. Next. we describe the protocol for the case study, present findings and identify research and managerial implications.