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International audience; This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems.

The objective of this study is to contribute conceptually and empirically to the discussion about when firms attempt to align their political efforts with their social goals and how this alignment affects their financial performance, an area currently still under-explored. The empirical context for our analysis focuses on companies that have been singled out due to their efforts to emphasize “shared value” defined as integrating competitive and social policies. The specific research questions that we shed light on in this study include: What have been the types of political efforts that these firms singled out in the pursuit of their shared value goals? Or, stated slightly differently: What is the political capacity of firms who have embraced social goals as part of their competitive strategy? Relatedly, we ask whether shared-value firms are more likely to deploy their political efforts to promote their social values initiatives and whether political and social alignment boost a firm’s net income.

International audience

International audience

Supplemental material, Supplementary_Appendices for Who Do They Think They Are? Identity as an Antecedent of Social Activism by Institutional Shareholders by Katarina Sikavica, Elise Perrault and Kathleen Rehbein in Business & Society

It has recently been argued that CSR is ‘political’. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure favorable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and CPA that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm’s CSR and CPA—alignment, misalignment and nonalignment—affects the firm’s reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.