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.

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Recently, the authors presented a bibliometric analysis of research and theory on corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance, which included a list of frequently cited articles in these fields. This list caused some questions, and therefore this research note aims to supplement and discuss the findings presented in the original study to (a) explain the composition of the dataset used, (b) highlight some problems pertaining to bibliometric research, and (c) underline why such studies nevertheless are useful, also in business and society research.

People working on a task can make errors along the way. How people deal with an error, however, depends on the type of error approach they apply. One approach, error management, focuses on increasing the positive and decreasing the negative consequences of errors. A second approach, error prevention, focuses on working faultlessly. In two experiments, we manipulated error approach through task instructions and measured on-task thoughts and offtask thoughts. In Experiment 1 (N = 78), error management resulted in more on-task thoughts, but no differences were found for off-task thoughts. Experiment 2 (N = 76) replicated the findings of Experiment 1, and further demonstrated that error management resulted in better analogical and adaptive transfer performance, and that these effects were mediated by on-task thoughts. Our findings point toward the benefits of error management instructions for people and organisations. Specifically, error management instructions make people more focused on the task during practice, as indicated by on-task thoughts, which in turn results in higher performance after practice.

We focus attention on the public policy-making influence of frontline bureaucrats. They are increasingly operating in interorganizational partnerships and networks in which they develop collaborative relations with frontline workers of other public organizations. We theorize that their embeddedness in local interorganizational environments induces and enables them to defy locally inappropriate policies and to pursue locally relevant policies as policy entrepreneurs simultaneously. The case study of policy-making in Dutch civil–military crisis management demonstrates that this “frontline bureaucratic politics” bears considerably on policy outcomes. We conclude that viewing frontline workers as bureau-political actors enhances our understanding of public policy-making in interorganizational arrangements.