How do multinationals build social capital? A social capital approach to corporate citizenship projects ESRC Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, Working Paper No. 302.

The objectives of this research are to provide new ways of thinking about and measuring the extent and effectiveness of multinational company efforts to contribute to society via their corporate citizenship (CC) (or corporate social responsibility - CSR) programmes. It uses as its method of analysis the emerging literature relating to the theory and measurement of social capital. The paper summarises the findings of a forthcoming book (from Palgrave, 2007). We begin by discussing the concept of corporate citizenship in the context of the multinational. We go on to introduce the concept of social capital employed in the study. Next we summarise our case study evidence with cases from Anglo American and Diageo. Following this, we review our statistical and econometric analysis which maps the community engagements of UK multinationals in South Africa, US multinationals in Mexico and EU multinationals in Poland. We demonstrate the usefulness for analysis of social capital thinking in this context and make suggestions for future work.