Following the publication of their award-winning paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, which examined how local communities shape business responses to social issues, School of Management academics Enrico Forti and Joost Rietveld joined co-author Alessandro Piazza (Rice University) for a conversation with digital platform Faculti. The discussion dives into the motivations behind the research and its implications for businesses navigating societal challenges.
Locality Still Matters in a Global Age
Joost Rietveld highlighted that even in an era dominated by global connectivity and AI-driven strategies, businesses cannot afford to neglect the influence of local communities. “We live in a world where increasingly everything we do is digitised. Even when organisations and firms can conduct business on a global scale it is very important for them not to neglect the local communities that they are a part of.”
Measuring Community Structures
Enrico Forti emphasised that businesses have already have access to tools that can help them understand the social fabric of their communities. “There are ways to measure the structure of the local community that are less costly than compared to surveys or other tools that were used in the past”.
Why This Matters for Strategy
The conversation reinforces the paper’s central argument: responsiveness to social issues is not just an internal decision but one shaped by the community context. As Enrico continues: By shifting the lens to community structure, we go beyond one-size-fits-all approaches”.
