B Corp Certification and Its Impact on Organizations Over Time

Abstract

This study explores the impact of B Corp certification and its associated impact assessment on four case studies of small and medium-sized Brazilian companies certified as B Corps. The results reveal that although all companies had achieved high scores in the certification assessment, awarded on the basis of existing performance, they did not subsequently develop road maps for the future to improve their scores in the way which the B Corp Impact Assessment process endorses as one of the benefits of certification. Their incremental changes are discussed in the light of the main motivations and expectations of these companies' founders with regard to the certification. A central role of the B Corp certification for this group of companies was to improve their external reputation with investors, clients and consumers. They were not strongly driven to reshape internal processes in ways which would advance their scores in the impact assessment and which would tackle complex problems of corporate governance. Our findings contribute to enriching the discussion of stakeholder engagement and corporate governance in hybrid organizations and contribute to the emerging agenda on studying change over time in B Corps.

The B Corp Movement: A Systematic Literature Review

“…More oriented to the social aspect, Poponi et al [56] focus on how the B Corp certification system could contribute to an awareness-raising process in business organizations, and focus on stakeholder engagement, within the framework of the principles of the circular economy. On the other hand, Villela et al [57] investigate the effect of achieving and maintaining the B Corp certification on the evolution of ethical practices of socially responsible governance and stakeholder participation of these companies. Tabares [58] identifies to what extent and how B Corps contribute to the SDGs when focusing on the solution of identified social problems highlighted by the UN.…”

“…Within the empirical articles, two types of articles stand out depending on their methodology for data collection: those that conduct surveys [56,[58][59][60][61]63,65,[77][78][79] and those that use secondary databases as a source of information [22,25,46,49,50,52,53,62,64,66,76,80,81], among which B Lab particularly stands out. In some cases, they use data from both sources, that is, they conduct surveys, but also use information from secondary databases [54,55,57,[82][83][84][85][86].…”

“…Regarding the analysis methodology, it was observed that the two most common ones are content analysis [46,56,[59][60][61]82,83] and regressions [22,[49][50][51][52][53][54]62,64,66,84,[86][87][88]. In addition, there are two articles based on case studies [57,65]; in another article, the Delphi method is applied [77], and in another one, process monitoring is used (processtracking) [78].…”

“…However, there are also studies that use combined samples from several countries, such as the United States and Canada [80], or the United States and Europe [25]. There are also some articles whose studies are based on Latin American countries, such as Brazil [57], Chile [63,65] or a combination of both, as is the case of Munoz et al [78], whose study focuses on Argentina, Colombia and Chile. Likewise, other studies are based on Taiwan [77] and Africa [68].…”

Organizations with Impact? A Study on Italian Benefit Corporations Reporting Practices and Reporting Quality

“…B Corps are firms certified by a nonprofit organization named B Lab about their social and environmental performance. In detail, B Lab measures the score of corporations adopting the evaluating model of B Impact Assessment (BIA) that considers indicators about governance, workers, community, and environment and contributes to developing a social-oriented business model [26,27]. B Corps do not adopt a homogeneous legal structure, but they have to reach a minimum score of BIA to be allowed using the title of Certified B Corp, while during the assessment process, they can use the title of Pending B Corp.…”