Barkay 2011 When Business And Community Meet A Case Study Of Coca Cola

423112
2011

CRS39210.1177/0896920511423112BarkayCritical Sociology

Article

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

Critical Sociology
39(2) 277­–293
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0896920511423112 crs.sagepub.com Tamar Barkay

Tel Aviv University, Israel

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.
Keywords
capitalism, Coca-Cola, corporate community involvement, corporate social responsibility, governance, sociology

Introduction
This article offers a case study of the way a national subsidiary of a global corporation designs and executes community programs. While substantial literatures in both sociology and management studies consider the interface of corporations and communities, only a handful of studies to date offer an in-depth analysis of the way community programs are deployed on the ground (cf. Bond,
2008; Idemudia, 2009; Kapelus, 2002;

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