The pursuit of community engagement and support is commonly considered to be essential to the achievement of corporate social responsibility goals, irrespective of a firm's age, size, legal formation, or industry sector. Less well understood are the firmographic characteristics that may influence these philanthropic pursuits, namely, firm formation, firm closure, firm growth or decline, and firm relocation. This investigation into philanthropic engagement seeks to understand the impact of firmographics across the global wine industry. Data were collected via survey from 302 firms in the Old and New World wine sectors: Spain, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the United States. Ordinal logistic and multiple linear regressions were applied. Findings reveal that the cultural heritage of a wine business, and, to a lesser extent, its form of ownership, appear to be the two major determinants of philanthropic engagement.
TopIntroduction
Wine businesses provide jobs and economic benefits for their communities via multiplier effects. Although wine businesses tend to respond to community concerns, many stakeholders remain uncertain about the other community benefits that these businesses may generate (McCuan & Hertz, 2015). With regards to the topics of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability in the wine industry, most focus at both a practical and academic level has been on environmental performance. For example, a plethora of literature has focused on environmental sustainability from either the wine production or wine consumption perspectives (see for example, Baiano, 2021; Dodds et al., 2013; Flores, 2018; Marshall et al., 2010).
Less focus has been applied to the topic of philanthropy, which is a subset of CSR and is also a practice aligned with the social dimension of sustainability (Aaltonen et al., 2015). Philanthropy has been described as the voluntary contribution by a business of money, goods, time or expertise to the public good (Schuyt, Bekkers & Smit, 2010). The topic of philanthropy has been examined in earlier literature, including identification of the types of philanthropic activities that busiensses engage in (Carroll & Buchholtz, 2003; Lee et al., 2009), the motivations for philanthropy (Forbes, Fuentes Fernandez & Gilinsky, 2018; Lahdesmaki & Takala, 2012; Liket & Maas, 2016), the common beneficiaries of philanthropy (Godfrey, 2005; Seifert et al., 2004), and the business benefits gained through philanthropy (Becker-Olsen et al., 2006; Brammer & Millington, 2005). However, one criticism of the philanthropic literature is that it has predominantly focused on studies of large corporations in the US (Schaper & Savery, 2004). This focus on corporations is problematic, given the importance of SMEs in terms of national economies (Lukacs, 2005; Rekkas, 2021; Stankovic et al., 2018), as well as in terms of their prevalence in the wine industry (Mora & Akhter, 2012; Duarte-Alonso et al., 2014). Previous research has also mostly examined philanthropy in a single nation and studies at an industry sector level are scarce.
Firmographics are variables which describe a business, including size, age, location, and number of employees (Altman & Vidaver-Cohen, 2000). Prior research has identified links betwen engagement in philanthropy and various firmographic variables. For instance, national differences in philanthropic practices and performance have been identified (Gjolberg, 2009; Palazzo, 2002), and differences relating to the indsutry sector are also suggested (Brammer & Millington, 2006b). Whilst relationships between philanthropy and some firmographic variables have been identified in prior research, there have been few studies which have explored this at an industry level, or in the wine industry specifically.