When Business and Community Meet: A Case Study of Coca-Cola

Abstract

Community involvement programs occupy centre-stage in the portfolio of many corporations who display and report upon their socially responsible performance. Focusing mainly on issues such as charity and employee volunteering, corporations remain fairly vague in reporting on the way they translate community involvement policies into concrete actions and on the social impact of their community programs. Based on first-hand observations and on-site ethnographic accounts, this study seeks to enrich extant understandings of the character and consequences of corporate involvement in communities. The study follows the diffusion of Coca-Cola’s global branding strategy and the community involvement program it recommended to the Israeli franchisee and analyzes its design and execution on the ground. The study finds a considerable gap between rhetoric of community involvement and practices of mobilizing the community to further the company’s ends. On a theoretical level, the study shows that community programs function as material performances of present-day capitalist ideology.