Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the attention paid to the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the idea that corporations have an obligation to consider the impact of their decisions on a broad set of stakeholders that extends well beyond their investors. Such social concerns are by no means new; they were matters for corporate boardroom and top management discussions long before Milton Friedman published his famous editorial on the social responsibility of business.1 Nonetheless, for at least the past decade and since the passing of the Global Financial Crisis, CSR advocates have more vigorously pursued their mission of incorporating social concerns within the purview of corporate decision-making.
Working Paper
There are still many, many things we do not know about how taking a more sustainable approach to business can lead to better financial, social, and environmental outcomes for a wider range of stakeholders. We aspire to make the Center for Sustainable Business a world-renowned hub for applied research in the field of sustainable business models.
CSB Working Paper Series
The Power of Purpose: Using Internal Marketing to Drive Employee Sustainability Engagement
Given the sustainability challenges humanity faces, companies need to go beyond sustainability rhetoric to motivate and enable all their employees to incorporate sustainability into their jobs. Taking an internal marketing perspective, we propose a novel conceptual framework that establishes the key role of corporate purpose in driving employees’ sustainability behaviors, via the mediating role of the psychological ownership of sustainability (SO) among employees. Through five studies, two of which are conducted in collaboration with partner companies, and responses from more than 1,600 employees, we establish a company’s articulated purpose, the autonomy employees feel, and the self-importance of their moral identity as interactive drivers of SO and sustainability behaviors. Specifically, these are highest when employees (a) perceive their employer to have a purpose beyond profit maximization, (b) perceive high autonomy, and (c) morality is an important part of their sense of who they are.
When and How Does Negative Publicity Lead to Better Financial Performance? Consumer Boycotts in the Age of Political Polarization
Backup Analysis for Conversation Article
Firms and Social Responsibility: A Review of ESG and CSR Research in Corporate Finance
Women’s Activism, Corporate Identity, and Female Board Representation
Building Democratic Systems for Startups
With Center for Sustainable Business support, Trevor Young-Hyman, Assistant Professor of Business Administration and Sociology in the Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, has undertaken a new research project on the formation of democratic business organizations in the entrepreneurship space. See below for a more in-depth description of this forthcoming working paper.
Worker cooperatives, credit unions, grocery cooperatives, professional partnerships, and utility cooperatives are all examples of democratically governed organizations, where members hold formal power to either govern directly or elect representatives to a governing body. Democratic organizations have been suggested as a means to formalize socially responsible business, through a governance structure that provides representation to community and worker stakeholders. Democratic firms have demonstrated a number of socially beneficial outcomes: expanding access to market opportunities for marginalized groups, reducing poverty, reducing internal wage disparity, increasing employment stability, and prioritizing environmental sustainability. However, a key question concerns their creation and emergence: we have little understanding of the relationship between democratic organization and entrepreneurship. While some have characterized entrepreneurial firms as inherently less hierarchical, the demands for strong leadership and rapid decision-making in entrepreneurial firms may hinder democratic organization. In this project, we explore this question through a longitudinal ethnographic study of a nascent democratic organization in Pittsburgh. We negotiated permission to collect audio and video recordings of meetings, interview workers, observe the day-to-day life of the organization, access archival documents, and scrape chat data from their online platform. We collected data between 2018, when the worker cooperative was established, and was completed in 2020. We will use an inductive coding process to develop theory around the ways that democratic organization and entrepreneurial demands interact, how they reinforce each other, how they conflict, and how these conflicts can be resolved.
Corporate Purpose and Employee Sustainability Behaviors
This paper examines the effects of employees’ sense that they work for a purpose-driven company on their workplace sustainability behaviors. Conceptualizing corporate purpose as an overarching, relevant, shared ethical vision of why a company exists and where it needs to go, we argue that it is particularly suited for driving employee sustainability behaviors, which are more ethically complex than the types of employee ethical behaviors typically examined by prior research. Through four studies, two involving the actual employees of construction companies, we demonstrate that purpose drives the sustainability behaviors of employees by causing them to take psychological ownership of sustainability. In addition, we show that the sustainability-enhancing effect of purpose is stronger when employees perceive that they have higher autonomy in enacting their sustainability actions and for those employees for whom being moral is more central to their sense of self.
Do Firms Undercut Environmental Tax by Avoiding More Income Taxes?
The Chinese government enacted an Environmental Protection Tax Law in 2018 in an effort to reduce corporate pollution. In this study, we investigate whether firms try to undercut this environmental protection measure by avoiding more other types of taxes. We find that firms operating in pollution industries engage in more avoidance of corporate income taxes after 2018. As a result, the effect of the environmental tax on firms’ overall tax burden is mitigated. Also, we find that the reduction in pollution of these firms after 2018 is smaller when the firms avoid more income taxes. These findings are consistent with firms try to undercut this environmental protection measure by avoiding more income taxes.
Does Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting Help Firms Attract More Socially Responsible Customers?
Using a Chinese market setting where some firms are required to provide Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports annually from 2008, we examine whether CSR reporting helps firms attract socially responsible customers. We find that after the mandatory CSR reporting requirement, firms that are required to provide CSR reports experience an increases in their exports to customers in countries with high social awareness. However, their exports to customers in countries with low social awareness do not significantly change. These findings support the argument that CSR reporting helps firms attract socially responsible customers. Our findings help us better understand the benefits of CSR reporting to firms and investors.