George Serafeim / Jody Grewal
Research on Corporate Sustainability provides an overview of key papers in the corporate sustainability literature and directions for future research. It is structured on three key themes: measuring corporate sustainability performance; managing corporate sustainability performance and how in turn corporate sustainability performance might improve corporate financial performance; and communicating corporate sustainability performance. The monograph concludes with a provocative section articulating a hypothesis that the concept of performance measurement is inherently flawed and the authors discuss a host of efforts and commentators that question whether the purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder value. According to this emerging viewpoint, the purpose of the corporation is much broader, multi-dimensional and focuses on providing solutions to the world’s pressing problems in a profitable way. The authors put forward that for this new concept of the purpose of the corporation to be authentic, legitimate and efficient, one needs to be able to measure social impact and reflect that in financial statements. The outcome of this process would be impact-weighted financial accounts that allow business decision makers to optimize risk, return and impact.
