With
the Ski World Championship about to end in Schladming, I am reminded of my trip
to Hakuba, Japan, last year. It is a great place for alpine skiing that has ski
runs and other facilities made for the 1998 Nagano Olympics. I plan to go back
there this year. But it also has some facilities that are not used much
anymore, and its location in an isolated valley makes me wonder how it handled
such a large event as the Olympics. The same could be said for Nagano
prefecture, which is far from Japan's center in population and
economy.
How
does such a mega-event affect a small community? Indeed, how does a big event affect
any size community, such as when Los Angeles hosted the Olympics? In recent
research in Administrative Science Quarterly, András Tilcsik and Christopher
Marquis looked at how mega-events affected corporate philanthropy. They showed
that mega-events opened corporate wallets, with firms giving more money
overall, including after the event. The continuation of giving after the event
matters because it shows that the giving is not just for that event, and that
there could be a longer lasting effect on the community. Unfortunately, as they
show, the effect seems to peter out into nothing after a few years.
Hosting
the Olympics is fun. But there are also negative mega-events, like a hurricane
or other natural disaster, and these unwanted events create a need for corporate
giving in order to rebuild the community. But they also reduce the resources
available to firms. What is the net effect? Tilcik and Marquis found that corporate giving does increase
after a disaster but, sadly, only if the disaster is small. For major
disasters, corporate giving decreases. It is easy to see why, because the firms
that might have given are themselves affected and have fewer resources to
spare. This is bad news because it is major disasters (like the recent huge
hurricanes in the US) that really call for corporate giving in addition to government
and individual efforts.
What
about the long-term effects? Tilcik and Marquis did not find any effects on corporate
giving. However, in research that I have previously discussed in my blog post
Community Imprinting, communities do experience long-term effects of some
events. My collaborator Hayagreeva Rao published an article in American Journal of Sociology on how communities become
better at founding community organizations after they had done so earlier.
However, we also found that a major disaster, the Spanish Flu, had a negative
effect on the ability to form community organizations long time after.
That
finding is worrying when compared with what Tilcik and Marquis found. If a
community devastated by a major disaster is less able to form community
organizations for a long time after, and its corporate giving is reduced rather
than increased (even if it is only in the short run), it is hard to see how it
can recover fully. How disasters affect individuals, communities, and
corporations is an important topic for research because learning more about how a community can make a natural recovery corporate giving and collective action can help us better understand the effects
of a world that may be increasingly affected by extreme weather events. If
there is no natural recovery, it is time to start a discussion about how to
help communities overcome the long-term effects of disasters, and whether to start thinking differently about communities that are at risk of disasters in the future.
