Community Business Engagement – Perspectives on Collaborative Approaches

Lee L¹*

1. Department of Management and Enterprise Development, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Vibrant and resilient communities are those where people and groups feel a strong sense of responsibility and work together for their community. Corporate citizenship highlights a collective dimension – business engaging collaboratively not only in the articulation and management of its own responsibilities but also in the resolution of important community issues.

Despite a growing body of literature on corporate citizenship and business community collaboration and considerable experimentation around the world, translating some of the underpinning concepts into practice appears problematic. Within this notion of ‘collaboration’ business and community groups often have different expectations. Yet business-community collaboration is frequently explained through business understandings and experiences, neglecting the voices of other community stakeholders such as community organizations.

This paper explores some of the complexities faced in developing social problem-solving collaborations and focuses on community stakeholder perspectives and understandings of business responsibility in addressing community issues. The discussion draws on action-based field research I undertook in collaboration with local community organizations in an urban community context in New Zealand.

The discussion is grounded in the context of actual business community collaboration practices – what people say and do in efforts to foster and initiate business-community collaboration. In the discussion I highlight three broad factors impacting on efforts to foster and initiate business community collaboration – significant differences apparent in understandings of community issues and opportunities for social problem-solving collaborations; critical role played by intermediaries; importance of considering contextual factors in the social, political and economic environments of business and community groups.

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