THE CORPORATE SOCIAL PERFORMANCE - FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE LINK

Strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them. Recent scholarship in strategic manag ement suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management, rather than traditional arenas of strategic management. Using a greatly improved source of dat a on corporate social performance, this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance. Corporate social performance (CSP) is found to be positi vely associated with prior financial performance, supporting the theor y that slack resource availability and CSP are positively related. CSP is also found to be positively associated with future financial perfo rmance, supporting the theory that good management and CSP are positiv ely related. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.