Social responsibilities of businesses and their managers have been discussed since the 1950s. Yet no consensus about progress has been achieved in the corporate social responsibility/corporate social performance literature. In this article, we seek to analyze three views on this literature. One view is that development occurred from conceptual vagueness, through clarification of central constructs and their relationships, to the testing of theory—a process supported by increased sophistication in research methods. In contrast, other authors claim that hardly any progress is to be expected because of the inherently normative character of the literature. A final view is that progress in the literature on the social responsibilities of business is obscured or even hampered by the continuing introduction of newconstructs. This article explores which of these three views better describes the evolution of the literature during a period of 30 years and suggests implications for further research.

Using insights from the social movement literature and institutional change theory, we explore how activism influences corporate social change activities. As the responsibility for addressing a variety of social issues is transferred from the state to the private sector, activist groups increasingly challenge firms to take up such issues, seeking to influence the nature and level of corporate social change activities. Eventually, they aim to bring about field-level change. We argue that ideological differences among activist groups motivate them to choose different influence tactics to support their claims.

It has recently been argued that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is 'political'. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure favourable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and corporate political activity (CPA) that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm's CSR and CPA -alignment, misalignment, and non-alignment -affect the firm's reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.

Insights from "the machine stops" to better understand rational assumptions in algorithmic decision making and its implications for organizations.