Organizing Research in Corporate Social Performance

The field of business environment studies has never had a single, accepted, systematic integrating to organize thinking about and practice. In order to evaluate existing work and to suggest the kind of analytical structures this field seems to need, this paper introduces the concepts of a or classification logic and of a theory logic. After noting some persistent problems in the nature of research in business and society, the paper reviews major works that identify corporate social performance as the most appropriate focus for the field. Building on the recent work of Donna Wood, the paper then proposes a true systems model as a sorting able to systematically subsume all of the previous work. The systems model is found both to include all the components of previous models and to suggest additional features; no existing approach is able to do this. It thus provides a basis both for understanding the relationships among the apparently disparate works that have described the field in the past, as well as to build more integrated analysis and in the future. Note: This paper was presented at a plenary, showcase session at the International Association for Business and Society (IABS) Meeting in San Diego, CA, in 1993. A much shorter, edited version was published in the conference proceedings. It is posted in SSRN to make the full paper available to scholars, since its topic and model remain of high relevance to work in the field.