Overcoming the dual liability of foreignness and privateness in international corporate citizenship partnerships

Zahra Bhanji and Joanne Oxley
Additional contact information
Zahra Bhanji: Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Journal of International Business Studies, 2013, vol. 44, issue 4, 290-311

Abstract: Responding to increased demands from stakeholder groups, many companies have instituted corporate citizenship programs in recent years, leveraging their specialized resources to create public goods and services at home and abroad. Significant suspicion nonetheless remains about the motives and impact of corporations acting in domains traditionally served by government and “third-sector” organizations. We argue that such ambivalence undermines the perceived legitimacy of private investments in public goods, and that this fundamental liability of privateness (LOP) constitutes a significant obstacle to corporations acting in the public domain through corporate citizenship initiatives. For multinational corporations (MNCs), the challenges stemming from the LOP are further amplified by the liability of foreignness (LOF) commonly associated with international business operations. We discuss the origins of the LOP and derive implications of the “dual liability” of LOP and LOF for partnering choices in MNCs’ corporate citizenship programs. We highlight limitations on the set of credible governance mechanisms available to participants in these partnerships, describe a set of alternative governance arrangements that serve to realign incentives among alliance partners, and link these to the severity of the LOP in a particular setting. We illustrate our arguments with a case description of Microsoft's Partners in Learning program.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jibs/journal/v44/n4/pdf/jibs20138a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jibs/journal/v44/n4/full/jibs20138a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:jintbs:v:44:y:2013:i:4:p:290-311

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/41267/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Business Studies is currently edited by John Cantwell

More articles in Journal of International Business Studies from Palgrave Macmillan, Academy of International Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().