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Community Involvement and the Perception of Success among Small Business Operators in Small Towns*
The enlightened self-interest model of corporate social responsibility predicts that businesses that support their local communities will be more successful. The logic is that business support of the community will be recognized and rewarded by residents in their roles as customers, employees, professional service providers, suppliers, voters, bankers, and so on. This in turn will help to make socially responsible businesses more successful. Small businesses in small towns provide a good laboratory for examination of this issue. Data from telephone interviews with a stratified random sample of 1,008 small business owners and managers in 30 small Iowa communities
were used to elaborate the relationship. Business success was measured by asking owners and managers their assessment of the success of their businesses. Scales were developed to measure business support for and commitment to the community from self-reports of behavior and attitudes. Findings show that controlling for community, business, and operator demographics, perceived business success is significantly associated with business operators' support for and commitment to the community. Consideration of variables related to the social responsibility of businesses significantly improves predictions of operators' perceptions of business success.
The purpose of this analysis is to elaborate the relationship between the success of small businesses and their level of social responsibility. It focuses specifically on one dimension of social responsibility-commitment to and support for the community. Scholarship about corporate social responsibility recognizes several different variants of what is generally thought of as good corporate citizenship (Post 1996; Carroll 1979; Frederick 1986). In this article, "corporate social responsibility" means the contribution that businesses make to the public good above and beyond the provision of goods and services that they exchange in the market. Public goods are specifically defined as goods that are not diminished by others' enjoyment of them, and once provided, the public good is available to all (Olson 1965; Boulding 1973). Examples include clean air, public radio, and community betterment. Because the term "corporate social responsibility" reflects the bias toward big business that permeates the scholarship on this subject, in this article the term "business social responsibility" will be used instead in an attempt to broaden consideration to all for-profit organizations.
The...