Corporate Social Performance, Stakeholder Satisfaction, and Generalizability Theory

Corporate social performance research implies that, ideally, organizational researchers can measure fairly accurately when a company ‘does good’ and strives for a better society. However, in a post-Enlightenment world in which moral language seems to have lost much of its substance (Maclntyre, 1984), we cannot, in fact, presume that ‘good’ corporate behavior is self-evident. Instead, researchers must continuously keep a critical attitude toward many so-called ‘good’ organizational policies, such as those related to affirmative action and work/life balance, for instance. Organizational activities or values are rarely absolutely or generally ‘good’, but instead the virtue of particular actions can only be evaluated in particular contexts by particular stakeholder groups (Maclntyre, 1988). This goes to the importance of an organization’s ability to incorporate feedback from stakeholders, as stressed in Chapter 3.