1. Abstract The European foundation sector has grown rapidly in number and size in the past 20 to 25 years with a significant growth rate since the 1980s (Hopt, et al.). In Germany, for example, more than 70% of the foundations were founded after the reunification in 1990 (Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen, 2014) and 70.65% of the active Spanish foundations existing in 2014 were less than 20 years old (Rubio Guerrero and Sosvilla Rivero, 2016). The European foundation sector is thus mainly characterized by a young and vital foundation population (Observatoire de la Fondation de France and CERPhi, 2015). Nevertheless, valid and reliable data on foundations on a European level are limited. There are several attempts to close this knowledge gap but still only a few studies focus particularly on corporate foundations. A comprehensive picture of the European corporate foundation sector is still not possible as the few existing studies differ in methodology and are either incomplete or outdated. Figures that allow further conclusions on the different models or functioning of corporate foundations in Europe are not existent. The objective is to give an insight to what we know and what we don't know about the current situation of corporate foundations. While we're able to put the spotlight on several interesting cases in the field this paper cannot give a comprehensive overview of corporate foundations in all European Foundation Sectors. 2. Main text 2.1. Structure and Method Due to limited data on corporate foundations in Europe, the issue of Corporate Foundations is tackled from three different perspectives. The aim is to provide a first explorative overview of the status of corporate foundations in Europe to enable an accurate understanding of this phenomenon. Therefore, we look in section 3 at corporate foundations from a superior perspective by examine their country specific foundation sector. As corporate foundations are predominantly public-benefit foundations and thus part of the foundation sector it's useful to start with an aggregated view on the European foundation sector. This helps to gain a first impression of the environment corporate foundations act in and possibly allows conclusions about the number and their country specific nature. In section 4 we present the results from our qualitative survey that was conducted with experts on corporate foundations from academia and representatives of national foundation associations. Due to the limited information we continue with a micro-level perspective in section 5 by using the case of the Vodafone Foundation. Although this approach has several limitations, for example a low response rate of the interviewed experts, the combined perspectives offer a first insight into the status quo of corporate foundations in Europe that will extend our understanding of these types of organizations. For the first perspective, we send in October 2016 an open-ended questionnaire with 14 questions to researchers from universities and research centers in 20 European countries that have a current research focus on corporate foundations and an overarching point of view of the country-specific foundation sector. As there are only a few academic experts within Europe that look at this topic we choose purposive sampling as an appropriate and effective method. This sampling method is used for non-random selections were the researcher wants to ensure the presence of specific individuals in the final sample as he is already aware of the cases with the unique and important knowledge on the research topic that is needed (Robinson, 2014). We received nine useable answers either with a full survey or with references to helpful reports or both.
CITATION STYLE
Gehringer, T., & von Schnurbein, G. (2020). Corporate Foundations in Europe (pp. 85–106). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25759-0_5
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.