It’s alluring and very much in vogue to connect social responsibility with profitability. If you can make a business case for positive social action, everybody wins—employees, shareholders, and society at large. But for decades researchers have labored to answer a nagging question: Is there, in fact, a link between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance? Not a strong one, according to an analysis of 167 such studies that were conducted over 35 years, a project we undertook with James P. Walsh from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.
