CSR Initiatives of Family Firms: An Analysis of Mexican Business Groups

This chapter studies the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives of the main business groups in Mexico. Studying family firms is important because they represent the world’s most predominant form of organizational (Claessens, Djankov, Fan, & Lang, 2002; Faccio & Lang, 2002; Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999). One way in which family firms organize their economic activity, structure, and behavior are business groups. In Mexico, family firms conform into business groups within the same family. The purpose of this chapter is to inquiry the Corporate Social Initiatives emanating from the main Mexican business groups. Through quantitative and qualitative exploratory research, findings show that business groups in Mexico orient their corporate social initiatives into internal and external strategies, and tend to distribute disproportionally the amount of initiatives and money invested among each of its affiliates. Also, firms affiliated to a business group have a higher probability than unaffiliated firms of being classified as “sustainable”, according to the IPC Sustainable Index.