This study focuses on how an organization manages disparate stakeholder groups to mobilize resources collectively in the face of a crisis. This is an important question because harmonizing the interests of multiple stakeholders is challenging due to their diverse interests. We conducted a real-time longitudinal case study analysis of a hospital while the COVID-19 crisis was unfolding. In the context of this study, some stakeholders were highly powerful, while others were very weak due to inefficient government and regulatory bodies. Our analysis found that the process of reciprocal resource sharing has an important role in managing multiple stakeholders. Reciprocal resource sharing is the organizational capacity to build strong relationships with multiple stakeholders by taking the lead in sharing a set of resources (valuable and inimitable, as well as tangible and intangible) according to stakeholder needs. Further, we offer a taxonomy of resources and explain the process of sharing valuable and inimitable resources. While the extant literature emphasizes preserving such resources, our study found that sharing them leads to better performance during times of crisis and is also helpful in addressing stakeholders’ concerns. This study can guide managers in addressing the interests of multiple stakeholders. Its findings imply that relationships are built to pool resources, and that resource mobilization through the involvement of stakeholders leads to better firm performance.

The wider discourse on the purpose of business reflects growing societal pressures on firms to clarify their overall strategic aims and orientation towards wider stakeholders. Building on extant purpose literature and focusing particularly on the differences between definitions of purpose, here we develop a novel normative conceptualisation of purpose. Our aim is to expand on the conditions needed to achieve purpose in its duty-based form, highlighting that this inherently requires a collective and distributed approach by stakeholders coalescing around a shared purpose. Therefore, rather than developing strategies for an individual corporate purpose, we outline how firms can engage in and support processes designed to address a shared purpose through participation in one or multiple purpose ecosystems. Our paper advances knowledge on the conceptualisation of purpose based on insights from both ecosystems and sustainability literatures. Our comprehensive research agenda invites researchers to refine our proposed conceptualisation and calls for practical application to evaluate its assumptions and effectiveness.

This study explores the complex relationship between happiness, sustainability, and the stakeholder approach within the social sciences. Using a thorough bibliometric mapping analysis, we identify key thematic areas and gaps in current research. Our findings reveal that the scope of social sciences approaches to human happiness has expanded to include aspects of social and environmental sustainability, engaging diverse stakeholders and methodologies. We argue that the stakeholder approach offers a valuable perspective on how organizations contribute to both individual and societal well-being through sustainable practices, highlighting their indirect responsibility for shaping the conditions for happiness. The paper's key contributions include a new taxonomy that categorizes research approaches into thematic areas, providing a structured understanding of the field. Among the theoretical propositions, we emphasize the link between well-being and sustainable development, underscoring the interdependence between happiness and sustainability. We introduce the concept of "sustainability happiness," positing that individual well-being and environmental sustainability are mutually reinforcing. This work contributes to the field by offering a comprehensive literature overview and a new conceptual framework, with practical implications for policymakers, managers, and researchers aiming to promote well-being and sustainability.

Focusing on a firm’s imbalance between internal and external stakeholder orientations, we propose that the impact of this stakeholder disparity on the firm’s market value depends on country-level trust. Integrating sociology research on societal trust with strategy research on corporate social responsibility (CSR), we argue that firms in countries with higher outgroup trust experience more negative effects from gaps between internal and external CSR actions. In contrast, in countries with greater ingroup trust compared to outgroup trust, the negative impact of the CSR gap on firm value is mitigated. Our empirical analysis of firms across 46 countries supports our predictions. Our study is the first to theoretically and empirically demonstrate the multilevel social capital framework on firm value throughout the cross-national investigation of the interactive influence of firm-level stakeholder orientations and country-level trust radius.

Recently, there has been a significant surge in interest and discourse surrounding corporate purpose among management practitioners and academia. The catalyst for this increased attention can be traced back to Larry Fink's influential letter to BlackRock's investors in 2018, which brought corporate purpose to the forefront of practitioners' discussions. Subsequently, in 2019, the Business Roundtable made a groundbreaking revision to its 40-year-old statement on corporate purposes. This revision entailed repositioning shareholder value maximization to an equivalent position, with the interests of various stakeholders such as employees and the natural environment. Within the realm of academia, corporate purpose has emerged as a prominent and widely debated topic in recent years. Henderson & Steen (2015) proposed a comprehensive framework for corporate purpose by exploring its implications for innovation. Furthermore, researchers have undertaken investigations into the relationship between corporate purpose and key dimensions such as financial performance (Gartenberg, Prat, & Serafeim, 2019), the distinction between public and private firms (Gartenberg & Serafeim, 2022), and sustainability (Gartenberg, 2022). Concurrently, efforts have been made to conceptualize corporate purpose either as a normatively neutral concept (Morrison & Mota, 2021) or within the context of institutional theory through institutional logics (Almandoz, 2023). Notably, researchers have also expressed reservations and doubts about the corporate purpose, positing it as an instance of symbolic management (Westphal, 2023) or simultaneously representing both a promise and a peril (Kaplan, 2023).

However, in the realm of delineating corporate purpose, a sphere that continues to elude consensus among scholarly circles, two salient characteristics emerge. First, corporate purpose invariably carries the imperative of conferring societal benefit (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1994; Henderson & Steen, 2015; Serafeim, 2020). Second, this commitment must be rendered in an authentic manner (Henderson, 2020; Jasinenko & Steuber, 2022; Serafeim, 2020). These dual postulates bear critical significance, for any breach therein not only invites interrogation of purpose's veracity, casting it as a mere semblance of symbolic management (Westphal, 2023), but also thrusts into question the integrity of the overarching concept. Therefore, it becomes apparent that research on corporate purpose need to go beyond empirical studies and into the realm of normative ethics. As such, this study embarks on the ambitious quest to propose a normative roadmap for practitioners and scholars to deploy an authentic and prosocial corporate purpose.

In the pursuit of our research objective, for the elaboration of our framework, we took inspiration from the business ethics literature, particularly the principles of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) emphasizing human dignity, common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. We decided to move forward with CST principles because they are normative mandates that are philosophically rooted in human nature and ethically validated in moral theology. The field of business ethics has historically engaged, both directly and indirectly, with the concept of corporate purpose (Fontrodona & Sison, 2006; Melé, 2009, 2012; Sison, 2007; Sison & Fontrodona, 2012, 2013) and CST principles with diverse issues such as sustainability (Rousseau, 2017), the dignity of work (Sison, Ferrero, & Guitián, 2016), consumer behavior (de Peyrelongue, Masclef, & Guillard, 2017), and organizational forms (Melé, 2005). Leveraging on CST, we seek to reconcile the concept of corporate purpose within the management literature, endowing it with both pragmatic underpinnings and normative grounding.