In academic research, many attempts have been undertaken to legitimize corporate community involvement by showing a business case for it. However, much less attention has been devoted to building understanding about the actual dynamics and challenges of managing CCI in the business context. As an alternative to existing predominantly static and top-down approaches, this paper introduces a social movement framework for analyzing CCI management. Based on the analysis of qualitative case study data, we argue that the active role of employees (...) pressuring for CCI policies and practices, as well as the organization audience responses to their efforts, are at the core of the challenges involved in managing CCI. These challenges also pose limits to how far CCI can be extended to a "business as usual" activity. (shrink)

Philanthropy is typically hierarchically constructed with an imbalance of power between funders and grantees. While this seems inherent in philanthropic relationships where funders inevitably control resources that grantees need, some women’s funds have sought to construct less hierarchical and thus more feminist relationships with the organizations they support. Based on many years of insider access to a local women’s fund, this article describes and explains the organization’s efforts to develop interactive dialogues with its grantees, which led to a change in (...) grants guidelines that were more inclusive of women’s methods of community organizing. A small survey of women’s community groups, done as background to this research, provides data on challenges and obstacles these groups face when seeking monies to support their work. Some attention is given to implications for general theories of organizations, for funder-grantee dialogues leading to increased accountability in philanthropy, and for support of women’s community organizations. (shrink)