Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 4, 1993

Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting

Organizing Research in Corporate Social Performance
The CSP System as Core Paradigm

The field of business environment studies has never had a single, accepted, systematic, integrating logic to organize thinking about theory and practice. This paper introduces the concepts of a "sorting" or "classification logic" and of a "theory logic." After noting some persistent problems in the nature of research in business and society, the paper reviews major works that identify "corporate social performance" as the most appropriate focus for the field. Building on the recent work of Donna Wood, the paper then proposes a true systems model as a sorting logic able to systematically subsume all of the previous work. The systems model is found both to include all the components of previous models and to suggest additional features.