Date
Spring 5-9-2020
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA)
Document Type
honors paper
Restricted Access
Unrestricted
Abstract
Stakeholder theory and stakeholder management theories have gained popularity among practitioners and scholars in recent decades for both its normative and positive power. Intuitively, it is easy to assume that firms who manage for stakeholders utilize various stakeholder management strategies to realize their corporate values. Thus, this study intends to examine the degree of synchronization, or the lack thereof, between a firm’s publicly endorsed values and the values embedded in its CSR stakeholder management activity, specifically, charitable donations. More importantly, due to the different sizes and nature of the stakeholder networks faced by private and public firms, we expect the levels of synchronization to differ between the two, with the distinction that such values stray further from each other for public firms. We found that public and private firms differ in the levels of synchronization between their endorsed values and their charitable recipient organizations’ values on many semantic and psychological domains (17 categories). Interesting, contrary to our initial hypothesis, the level of discrepancy is greater among private firms than that of public firms on most domains (16 categories), which entices further research into determinants of firms’ behavior affected by institutionalized rituals.
Advisors
William P. Bottom