Managing Corporate Community Involvement (Van Der Voort,

¶ … 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 for business (Van der Voort, Glac, & Meijs 2009: 316). 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 of supporters, especially after the program became more institutionalized and managed by the corporation. A review of the data indicated that managers used diffuse array of techniques to 'sell' the program to employees. 'Coding' the responses yielded inconsistent responses about the purpose and functionality of CCI.

The qualitative study was admittedly limited to some degree, given the specificity of the culture and the sample population, and was used mainly as a touchstone of future research. The authors were willing to record anomalous results, and did not claim that their findings were conclusive. They do suggest that there is some transferability of results believing the justifications for CCI on the part of the organization tend to be fairly diffuse, and sometimes contradictory, once management has adopted the practice. Data collection / analysis: Discuss data collection, analysis and saturation.

At the end of the interview process of coding responses, the authors observed that attitudes towards CCI evolved over time, shifting from grassroots enthusiasm, to social movement organization, to using CCI as a HR tool, and finally, instituting the process with a managerial focus (Van der Voort, Glac, & Meijs 2009: 318). To gain a full perspective of this evolution, a variety of organizational actors were interviewed, spanning from employees who had first advocated for the use of CCI to those who viewed it cynically as a.