19070: The Evolution of Corporate Purpose

How does corporate purpose evolve toward more (or less) diverse notions of value and of value beneficiaries? What factors might positively or negatively influence such an evolutionary process? How can management scholars design large scale, collaborative, empirical studies to validate the answers to these questions and develop evidence-based implications for practice and policy? Whereas research on corporate purpose is gaining momentum in strategy and organization studies, the dynamic nature of the construct, let alone of its empirical realities, remains underexplored. This PDW aims to share some of thought leaders’ insights on how purpose evolves in business organizations. It also provides the opportunity to engage interested colleagues in a collective effort to explore how management scholarship can seize the opportunity to conceptually and empirically understand the factors that might (positively or negatively) influence firms’ learning and adaptation to rapidly changing societal expectations on their behaviours and impacts. In particular, we will discuss the possibility to converge on engaged scholarship designs of collaborative, longitudinal research across sectoral and geographical contexts to develop rigorous insights and test theoretical developments with both deep and broad observations. Management researchers can make new scholarly and practical advances by building large scale collaborations between academic institutions and businesses, including institutional and societal stakeholders. The study of the evolution of corporate purpose presents an ideal opportunity, due to its complexity and context-dependence, to do so. We hope this PDW can contribute toward this higher-level goal for our broad community of scholars and educators.