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This paper aims to propose and test a modified interpretation of long-standing issues on the corporate responsibility (CR)–corporate financial performance (CFP) relationship: companies involved in CR are in general no better and no worse in their level of financial performance than companies without such engagement because of the trade-off between benefit and cost at firm level and imbalance between supply and demand at industry (market) level.

The authors apply this frame to a data set with more than 12,000 observations over a 14-year period, using confidence intervals, as a useful and statistically valid approach for testing the null hypothesis.

The present study’s findings support neutrality between CR and CFP at the firm and industry levels, implying that a firm’s CR involvement neither penalizes nor improves its CFP.

CR activities may provide windows of opportunity for companies but do not systematically improve financial performance.

“Doing good” is not a panacea for corporate achievement with respect to market-facing activities. For firms to succeed, instead, they need to create and implement their business cases and models by converting their involvement in CR activities into drivers for better outcomes because investments in CR practices do alone not guarantee improved financial performance.

The innovations in this study are twofold. Conceptually, this paper proposes a comprehensive approach for a neutral CR–CFP linkage. Empirically, it introduces a novel and appropriate method for testing neutrality. These will mark an important advance in the theoretical and empirical debates over CR and CFP.

This chapter argues that corporate social responsibility (CSR) and even corporate sustainability and responsibility will be insufficient to generate the transformation needed for businesses, economies, and societies to deal with potentially existential sustainability, climate change, and inequality crises. A new socio-economic narrative needs to be created to underpin thinking about economies, societies, and nature. After briefly looking at CSR today, the paper discusses the power that the neoliberal narrative has in shaping understanding of the roles and purposes of businesses. It then argues for a new narrative emphasizing well-being, dignity, and sustainability, an economy in service to life, as an alternative, highlighting the powerful role that memes, core units of culture, play in shaping narratives.

This paper explores the dynamics and issues associated with system change oriented at developing collaboration with local communities within a university. The effort involves attempts to integrate theory, research, and practice across multiple disciplines, professional training initiatives that bring multiple disciplines into conversations on problems in the lives of children, families, and communities, and outreach to develop significant external community‐university collaboration. All five of the university's professional schools plus the graduate and undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences are involved in this discipline to develop communities of practice and inquiry around resolving complex social problems. The opportunities and hurdles faced in developing the initiative are discussed.

Climate change is upon us, and the soft landing window has almost certainly closed given the current pace of response. But climate change is only one of the huge issues facing humanity – indeed, the planetary boundaries model (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015) ranks biodiversity loss and biochemical flows even further along the path of irreversible planet-threatening change. In the face of powerful inertia, how can we at least shape the hard landing that seems inevitable, where civilization as we know it will likely collapse to support the rising of much better ones? The SDG Transformations Forum supports development of powerful T-systems as a purposeful transformation strategy with this goal. To do so, the Forum has developed a strategy drawing from leading knowledge about how transformation happens, and creating systems change communities that are applying and advancing the strategy in the experimental, adaptive manner focused on deep learning and radical action.

Using the competing values model of organisational effectiveness, and a set of variables derived from the inter‐organisational relations literature, it is attempted to establish the correlates of overall effectiveness and partner satisfaction in social partnerships. Correlational analysis demonstrates that the competing values model variables and all of those derived from the interorganisational literature are highly intercorrelated, indicating that all measure some aspect of effectiveness. Multiple regression analysis indicates that the competing values are associated with overall effectiveness, while competing values and balanced partner relations (a process variable) are positively associated with partner satisfaction. Implications are discussed.

For years suspicions have abounded that institutional investors are notoriously short‐sighted when it comes to making their investment decisions. Faced with performance assessment on a monthly if not daily basis, institutional investors need to show timely results and hence may be under considerable pressure to improve short‐term payoff at the expense of long‐term performance. Because institutions today now own more than 50% of corporate equity, they wield an increasingly powerful influence on companies. This influence has recently been magnified with the emergence of activist institutions, lead by certain institutional investors such as CALPERS or TIAA‐CREF. As a result, there have been concerns among stakeholder groups and scholars that company decision makers will themselves yield to pressures to forego investments in longer‐term opportunities.

Despite all the attempts developed so far to measure corporate social performance in the last decades, a standard metric for it is still missing. In this work, the author tries to understand why is this the case. To do so, the author has reviewed 69 relevant metrics developed in the literature since the 1970s until today, covering approaches based on social, reputational, and environmental ratings, as well as several others constructed ad hoc by reputated scholars. The author analyzes each of them through a double optics, checking if they meet the minimum requirements to be considered standard and truly social. The research reveals that the main factor that prevents such a standard is the lack of truly social orientation of the existing metrics.

This chapter opens up a question central to the mission of the business in society field as it has evolved since the formation of division in the Academy of Management (AOM): What are the (future) distinctive competencies of business in society scholarship? We first empirically demonstrate that core topics to the business in society field, as represented by the Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division of the AOM, are now disseminated broadly throughout the management academy, represented by AOM. We call this dissemination the popularity paradox, because it demonstrates that SIM is not well connected with other divisions, that is, sub-disciplines of management despite that they are now regularly dealing with its core questions. Given that SIM’s (and business in society’s) traditional foci are now widely dispersed, the authors argue that it is time for business in society scholars, with SIM as proxy, to begin tackling new core issues that put growing civilizational threats around sustainability and the consequent need for system change and transformation front and center. In a sense, the authors argue that business in society scholars need to return to their roots of seriously questioning the roles and functions of businesses in society through a critical lens that asks and seeks to answer – today’s emerging new and tough questions, though the questions now emphasize the sustainability of human civilization as we know it.