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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.

International audience; In this chapter, we examine the role of NGO activism as a driver of sustainability. Such activism offers opportunities and poses challenges to firms; examining the role of activism is important to appreciate the broader question of what makes businesses more sustainable and more socially responsible. We provide an overview of what activist NGOs are and explore ways by which they seek to influence corporate policies, ranging from collaboration and partnerships to contestation and protest. We then discuss which firms are more likely to encounter NGO activism as not all firms are equally susceptible to NGO activism. Firm size, industry and visibility to consumers are important elements, as well as their historical record on CSR and sustainability issues. Finally, we discuss how firms may respond to NGO activism. For a firm to take responsibility implies that it moves beyond the defence of its own economic interests, to consider the questions of what kind of corporation the firm wishes to be, what role in society it aspires to fulfil and how to relate to its various stakeholders. Ultimately, these are questions of ethics.

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