Corporate philanthropy in the United States has long been highly localized in the communities where firms have headquarters or other significant business operations. Although individuals contribute the largest share of philanthropy, corporations play a central role in the private funding of non-profit causes in the U.S. at the community level through their direct corporate philanthropy programs or corporate sponsored foundations. Two trends may be causing a break with this traditional corporate localism, the globalization of firms and their markets, and the shift to forms of strategic philanthropy that are beneficial to corporate interests rather than philanthropy which meets the needs of a specific community. While there is recognition in the scholarly literature of these shifts, there is no clear evidence that shows how the globalization level of U.S. firms is linked to the changing scales of U.S. corporate philanthropy. This doctoral dissertation research project will bridge this gap by exploring how the local and global philanthropy of U.S. corporations changes as firms become more global. The project will use a quantitative approach to determine whether U.S. corporations that have higher degrees of globalization have a greater or lesser philanthropic commitment to the local places where they have operations or markets than do less globalized firms. The project will measure the degree of globalization for a sample of 200 public corporations that have active corporate foundations for their philanthropy programs, with Data on the charitable contributions of the sampled firms will be drawn from the public tax filings for each corporate foundation. By grouping corporate donations into geographical variables that are also categorized by their place or strategic links, the project will determine whether the break with the traditional localism is confirmed and whether this varies with the level of globalization of a corporation. The project also will use semi-structured, key-informant interviews to compare the global philanthropy of 20 to 25 firms based in Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle in order to ascertain the effects of globalization on the local and global philanthropy practices of U.S. firms over a ten-year period and to determine if there is a causal connection between these processes. Because past studies point to the geographically and historically contingent nature of corporate philanthropy and the theoretical context for the study also points to the embeddedness of corporations in specific networks of power elites in local places, a minimum of three cases is necessary to account for the local specificity of corporate philanthropy in different places and to determine what general factors occur in all of the cities. The project will confirm whether corporate philanthropy is moving away from its historical tradition of localism in the U.S. and if the new trends toward globalization and strategic philanthropy are indeed displacing past practices. In sum, this research will identify how the geographic scale of corporate philanthropy is re-defined in local places as corporations become more global. It will use an empirical methodology to highlight how the process of globalization is operationalized simultaneously at local and global scales and will contribute to emerging theories of scale. It will confirm whether globalization of the firm breaks the traditional localism of U.S. philanthropy and whether there is a level of localism for corporate philanthropy directed to non-U.S. beneficiaries. This research will contribute to our knowledge of the emerging global geography of corporate philanthropy, the changing relationship of corporations to local communities, and will add more generally to our understanding of the processes of globalization. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
