Abstract

Section 18A, read with section 30 and the Ninth Schedule to the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962 (ITA), provides a legal framework for a deduction against taxable income of philanthropic contributions to defined nonprofit public benefit organisations in South Africa. This premise and the defined public benefit activities listed in the Ninth Schedule to the ITA formed the foundation for conducting a systematic literature review. The purpose of this research was to construct definitions for the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR), investment (CSI), and philanthropy (CP), specifically for the South African context. The research was qualitative in nature and employed a three-stage inductive research method. Atlas.ti 23 was used to assist in the data collection and thematic analysis process. Deductive reasoning was used as the final step to interpret the identified themes and employ the frequency of codes to develop the definitions. The result was the drafting of South African context-related definitions for each concept of CSR, CSI, and CP. The value of this research is twofold: the themes/characteristics included in the proposed definitions were determined through transparent and scientific methods. Secondly, each definition can be uniform for that specific concept (whether CSR, CSI, or CP), and researchers (at least for the South African case) no longer have to rely on general definitions.