Philanthropy in Family Businesses - Working Paper

This paper aims at boosting the understanding of the rising phenomenon of family business philanthropy (FBP) which cross-fertilizes the family business logic with philanthropy logic; highlighting the heterogeneity of this construct (Drencheva and Au, 2021). We try to answer our first research question related to the way family businesses describe themselves as philanthropic in a specific empirical context. We would be investigating the way family businesses perceive their charitable giving beyond their business operation and how they usually structure their philanthropic activities. Such activities include “voluntary donations of resources [money, time or goods] to support the betterment of society” (Bhatnagar et al., 2020: 715) by addressing problems such as poverty, food security, and health etc. In this aspect, we narrow the focus on this study by selecting our empirical setting to be the country Lebanon; whereby philanthropic activities are usually associated to the crisis context that the country suffers from for a long period of time. Our main contribution is twofold. First, we are observing the phenomenon from a specific empirical context. Second, we attempt at constructing a standardized definition for philanthropy in family firms i.e. Family Business Philanthropy (FBP).