GSIF Post #3

Describe the five major stakeholders for your project and their motivations.
The stakeholders in our project include the government, public companies, private companies, researchers involved in this law, and the NGOs we will collaborate with.
1) The motivations of the government are highlighted within the 2013 Companies Act, where the government wants firms to join public sector firms in annual donations under Corporate Social Responsibility. Because this law brings in new actors such as private sector companies, it is apparent that the government seeks to integrate the sector, with the state brokering a partnership between the private sector and civil society. Within our project, the government will find motivations to collaborate in providing data of which companies have engaged in previous CSR as a source of research for us.
2) Public companies in India often have a history of giving CSR prior to this law, so our project will have an impact to these companies to a lesser extent. Through our project, public companies would have motivations to possibly encourage the findings for our project of best practices, through sharing these practices previously implemented. As they may seek to encourage private companies to pick up the slack of corporate social responsibility, they may play a vital role in guiding our project towards addressing the correct issues of CSR in India today.
3) Private companies and their relations to civil society sectors will be of the main focus that our project caters to. Their motivations lie in trying to create effective CSR programs within their company while also, expectedly, attempting to hold onto as much profit as they can for their own stakeholders. In relation to our project, private companies will try to be seen in the best light, and show how they exhibit good CSR practices while also balancing the needs and expectations of their own profit margins.
4) The research and literature written about this law and examining the partnership is fairly limited, as it is a recent venture. As such, the project can be a source of clarity on the topic for various academic fields, while also providing an outsider’s perspective into the mechanisms at play between the various actors involved on the ground in India. Their motivations will be of least concern to our individual project, as it will have the least impact on our findings, but it will nonetheless be important to note the scope of which our research will enter the field into for the future.
5) The NGOs we collaborate with will have increased motivation to see our project, and the law, be deemed a success for holding corporations responsible for their funding. As such, they want to see corporations give their profits to their organization, in lieu of giving it to any other organization. Consequently, the CSR funding will be operating in a zero-sum game, and thus NGOs will find it beneficial through our project to try to enhance their credibility in order to receive funds. They want to show that their NGO will use the funds in the most proactive and efficient way, to make the most change occur.
Describe three ways in which you will validate your project and enhance your credibility over the course of the semester.
Firstly, I will enhance my credibility throughout the semester by informing myself as much as I can of the expertise surrounding this field of data collection, through primary and secondary source research. By becoming knowledgeable about the context of this law and the current CSR practices employed by current Indian companies, I will be further suited in analyzing which practices do and don’t work best in the long term. Secondly, the project will become validated by taking a range of corporations and NGOs, in size, issue area focus, employment, etc. and comparing those against its dependent variables that we will measure. By examining a diverse selection of groups, our findings will be better suited and further more credible to apply to a broader range of partnerships across the country. Finally, by understanding the mechanisms through which companies operate from a business managerial standpoint, our project will be more credible in that it will take realistic situations in defining its aims. Our research will not be conducted in a vacuum; by taking into account the innumerable motivations and factors that plays a part in corporate and NGO decision making, the project will hold stronger value in making its recommendations plausible for real-life applications.