Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 10, 1999

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting

Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy in Company-Sponsored Foundations

This study used The Foundation 1000 reference book for 1997-1998 in order to examine corporate philanthropy. The purpose was to identify patterns of foundation giving that might generalize to overall corporate giving (i.e., corporate direct giving as well as giving via foundations). Whereas foundations seem to follow norms about the types of activities supported and the proportion of foundation dollars that should be allocated to certain activities, there was considerable variation across industries in foundation expenditures aimed at customers.