¶ … Managing corporate community involvement" (Van der Voort, Glac, & Meijs 2009) attempts to understand how corporate community involvement (CCI) functions in an organization. CCI become an increasingly popular practice, albeit a controversial one. The article conducts a case study of a specific corporation that created a CCI program. The program began partially as a result of grass-roots efforts by employees. Procedure and paradigms

After a literature review of the subject, the authors conducted a three-year, qualitative study "on the micro-dynamics of framing CCI in a Dutch financial conglomerate" with "11,000 employees in the Netherlands" (Van der Voort, Glac, & Meijs 2009: 316). Semi-structured interviews were used as well as documented reviews of meeting minutes and relevant data that was used to create and monitor the CCI program. Both strong supporters and ambivalent employees were interviewed, and the subjects were selected on all levels of the corporate hierarchy.

What was examined in this research?

While the "provision of goods and services to nonprofit and civic organizations by corporations" has increased, the justification for why CCI is beneficial has spanned from traditional definitions of social responsibility to claiming that charitable donations are good PR...

The article studies CCI as a social movement, and examines pressures both for and against the practice by crucial organizational stakeholders. The interviews surveyed employee attitudes and experiences, and examined the evolution of the program, which was generated by a group of employees, but gradually became more institutionalized within the corporation.
CCI can take many forms, spanning from traditional donation to allowing employees to volunteer while at work. On one hand, CCI can generate good publicity for the company, and employee volunteering can help employees feel better about themselves as well as learn additional skills. However, employees may view corporate pressures to volunteer as self-serving on the part of the company, rather than a genuine effort to benefit society, and thus CCI can have a counterproductive effect. These different shadings of perspective were encapsulated in the wide range of interviews and were one of the reasons that a case study method was selected.

Rigor: How was rigor assured? Discuss credibility, dependability, transferability and goodness as appropriate.

Findings suggested that employees were more ambivalent about the practice than had originally been suspected, except for the original core group…