News

Rowe School of Business researcher and assistant professor Dr. Shuna Ho is one of several Dalhousie faculty members who have been awarded the SSHRC IDG Grant.

Dr. Ho’s research focuses on how multinational corporations use corporate political activities and corporate social responsibilities as two main types of non-market strategies to attain legal licenses and social licenses respectively. Dr. Ho’s research seeks to figure out the conditions that influence the attainment of social and legal licenses under the interplay among corporations, regulators and communities.

On the one hand, the complementarity or tension between corporate political activities and corporate social responsibilities has largely remained unexplored in the current literature. On the other hand, it is unclear whether it is legal license that expands its scope and influences social license or whether it is social license that extends its reach and impacts legal license. Dr. Ho’s research not only aims to lidentify some contexts in which the relationship between corporate social responsibilities and a social license may not be positive, but it also aims to solve a paradox related to corporate political activities. While corporate political activities are understood by many people as an easier way to attain legal licenses, some scholars contend that corporate political activities are antithetical to social licenses because these activities serve self-interests rather than public interests. In other words, corporate political activities may hinder the attainment of both social and legal licenses, especially when legal licensors, the receiving end of corporate political activities, must consider social licenses to become accountable to communities in civil society.