Bettering corporate social responsibility through empowerment and effective engagement practices: an Australian mining perspective

Stakeholder literature has affirmed the importance of stakeholder engagement to CSR, but little research has investigated the saliency of weak stakeholders or the development of relationships between weak stakeholders and businesses. The proposed study investigates how empowerment and engagement can influence CSR practices and outcomes. The case study approach for this proposed study uses a naturalistic and interpretivist paradigm. Qualitative primary data will be collected via focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews with sampled communities, representatives of case companies, and sampled stakeholder institutions. Content analysis will be done on secondary data from sampled companies. The study aims to develop a framework that makes empirical, policy, and theoretical contributions to the discourse on stakeholder salience, corporate-community partnerships and CSR practice.