Bibliographic record
Abstract
Corporate purpose is taking off as a concept within both the corporate world and management academia. Despite many bold pronouncements by companies about pursuing purpose and not just profits, evidence suggests that these are often decoupled from real action on social and environmental issues. In this essay, I grapple with a number of questions that arise for scholars and practitioners given the state of the field. Is the lack of progress intentional such that corporate purpose is just a power grab for firms to protect their influence and profits? Is making the business case for corporate purpose just part of this power grab? Stepping back, what is corporate purpose anyway? Additionally, how does it relate to trade-offs across stakeholders? Who counts as a stakeholder? How can we account for value distribution along with value creation? How can we conceptualize the firm if we take purpose seriously? What would it mean to decenter the firm (and center the stakeholders) in the practice of corporate purpose? What governance structures are needed to enact corporate purpose? Additionally, what are the implications for a new model of decentered leadership? There are not a lot of answers yet, but this review of recent research in the domain spots many excellent clues and paths for future progress. History: This paper has been accepted by Matt Kraatz for the Strategy Science Special Issue on Corporate Purpose. Funding: The Michael Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto provided financial support for the author’s research in this domain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.033 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".