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Today, companies permanently need to implement solutions aimed at generating competitive advantage that allow them to survive and be successful in ever changing and demanding markets. Therefore, to focus on customers is a common denominator for organizations, aiming to meet their needs and satisfy their expectations. In this context, society has become one of the players as one of the actors that highly influence corporate behavior. Communities have expressed more mistrust of corporations' because of various scandals. This has put business ethics in the spot light influencing companies to be good corporate citizens, respecting the law but also to create good social values and principles. Today, the level of demand goes beyond the direct impact of the organizations business to also incorporate how corporations can contribute to societal and environmental causes. For corporations, these activities are manifested through the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, from a corporate perspective, it is difficult to measure if these changes can have a positive impact on a firm. Instead, these contributory practices are mainly measurable from a philanthropic perspective. Therefore, it occurs to be a divergence between the concepts of competitiveness and business ethics which consequently raised our research question: How do large corporations, involved in philanthropic CSR projects, value the outcome of these projects? Our purpose with this thesis is to identify how corporations can increase their competitive advantage by supporting philanthropic projects. In order to achieve this, we have conducted a qualitative study where the collection of the empirical data was done through semi-structured interviews with three big corporations. These firms are all services providing companies who support social/philanthropic projects. This support is assisted by a non-profit organization that deals with social projects around the world while at the same time creates social commitment among corporations. In the theoretical framework, we have presented the concepts of competitive advantage, business ethics, branding, stakeholders and CSR as main theoretic pillars. The thesis also includes theories that relate these theories to each other, such as “Corporations and Society” and “CSR and Competitiveness”. In previous frameworks we found that there is a gap related to how theories describe the link between ethics and competitiveness in contemporary organizations. Finally in the analysis section we linked the empirical findings to presented theories and ultimately created a framework showing the correlation between competitiveness and business ethics and CSR. The main conclusions are that business ethics and competitiveness can be linked and bridged by the concept of CSR. Unlike previous theories we concluded that these two concepts are compatible which means that it is possible to get competitive advantage by pursuing social objectives.

If you look out the window today you can observe influences from all over the world. It seems like the world has shrunken and accessibility has gotten a bigger impact. We are talking about globalization and it can be said to diminish the boarders and unite people all over and contribute to more interactions between different countries and cultures, which in turn will lead to new challenges for companies. More companies can therefore meet in different contexts and for instance a company from Sweden where production costs are comparatively high will be attracted to markets like the Chinese because of their comparatively low production costs. The culture differences between these two nations are wide and will therefore cause implications like cultural clashes or misunderstandings. This is where our interest of the subject grew and hence our research question is: “How can Swedes avoid incidents of a cultural descent when developing business relations with Chinese corporations?” The main purpose of this study is to get a better comprehension on how businessmen perceive cultural differences in situations where business relationships are essential and how they avoid such incidents. In addition we have in this study divided the main purpose into three sub-purposes. These are: to gain a better understanding on how both Swedes and Chinese build relationships in business-to-business situations, to gain a better understanding of the differences in the Swedish and Chinese business culture, and to provide suggestions for Swedish entrepreneurs in becoming more aware of cultural gaps when entering the Chinese market. Our study is based on an hermeneutic approach. We have used an qualitative research strategy where our empirics are based upon seven semi-structured interviews with businessmen today resided in Sweden but have experience from Chinese business interaction. In addition both Swedish and Chinese businessmen have been interviewed to obtain a more balanced data. The contextualization we have made is aligned towards an individual perspective. Our theoretical frameworks consist of a wide range of theories such as: business relationships theories, relationship marketing theories, Guanxi theories, cultural theories, and culture clash theories. Based on our empirics we have been able to interlink many aspects to conclusions. These have mainly been differences in the two cultures, such as; difference in hierarchy level and how this has caused implications for Swedish businessmen. It was also showed that there are differences in approaching potential business proposals, where the Swedes tended to be direct in contrast to the Chinese who preferred a slower paste. In addition this study showed that what is referred to as Guanxi is far more linked to the Chinese culture than networking is in Sweden. For a Swedish business man these findings can help prevent incident of diversifying range but raise awareness of other cultural aspects that needs to be considered before going to China in business purposes.