Quants and Poets: Advancing Methods and Methodologies in Business and Society Research

Abstract

Business and society research has increasingly moved from the margins to the mainstream. Although this progression has benefited from advances in empirical research, the field continues to suffer from considerable methodological challenges that hamper its development. In this introductory article to the special issue, we review how far our field has come in advancing methods and methodologies in business and society research. We also highlight the methods and methodologies covered by the contributors to this special issue and how they help address key shortcomings in our field. Finally, we suggest some promising research methodologies that can address important business and society research challenges going forward.

Keywords

corporate social responsibility (CSR)qualitative methods quantitative methods

Over the past 20 years, business and society research in areas such as corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and business ethics has moved from the margins to the mainstream of both management thought and practice (Crane, Henriques, Husted, & Matten, 2015b). The increase in legitimacy of the business and society field during this period is, among other things, due to an expanding research community, the growing importance of metrics and data availability, enhanced theoretical development, burgeoning field of practice and practitioners, and the persistence of important phenomenological developments such as concerns about income inequality, globalization, financial crises, ethical controversies, and the emerging consensus that management research should have more to say about real-world problems beyond corporate financial performance.

Although there are many reasons for such progress, one of the key enablers for this change was the steady and increasing availability of company-level environmental, social, and governance data. The accessibility of company-level databases on environmental, social, and governance performance such as National Pollutant Release Inventory (Canada) and Toxic Release Inventory (the United States) data, Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Co. (KLD), Asset4, and various reputation data provided business and society researchers with a treasure trove of information to test their theories. For researchers undertaking quantitative work, merging financial data with social, environmental, and governance variables (across time and firms) offered opportunities to not only test existing theories but also expand thinking by developing new theoretical arguments. This has led to a rich and influential stream of literature exploring corporate social performance and its relationship with key variables such as corporate financial performance.

There have also been important developments on the qualitative research front (Redlich-Amirav & Higginbottom, 2014). Qualitative research is “an umbrella term covering an array of interpretive techniques which seek to describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the frequency, of certain more or less naturally occurring phenomena in the social world” (Van Maanen, 1979, p. 520). The four most common qualitative data collection methods include in-depth interviews, focus groups, archival data, and participant observation (Bluhm, Harman, Lee, & Mitchell, 2011). Technologies that categorize volumes of textual data (e.g., NVivo) have allowed researchers to deepen their analysis by seeking multiple data sources (interviews + archival data + social media data) from which to triangulate and perform accuracy checks (Bluhm et al., 2011, p. 13). As business and society research often deals with contested concepts such as sustainability and CSR, qualitative methods provide a methodological approach that allows researchers to obtain a deeper understanding of these concepts across time and cultures. As Eisenhardt, Graebner, and Sonenshein (2016) argue, qualitative methods generally, and inductive research in particular, are especially useful in making progress in understanding and tackling “grand challenges” such as poverty, climate change, and hunger. This is because such issues are complex and messy, with hard to measure constructs, and involve considerable novelty that is hard to theorize deductively.

Unfortunately, although the movement from the margins to the mainstream of business and society research has been partly enabled by advances in empirical research, progression has been hampered by a number of methodological problems. Business and societal challenges occur at multiple levels of analysis, unfold over long periods of time, involve a myriad of stakeholders, and may demand multiple theoretical foundations to inform. As such, they do not lend themselves as easily to the reductionist approaches that characterize some other business disciplines.

On the positive side, greater access to data and advances in research software are changing the business and society research landscape, and offer considerable potential for improvement. Business and society researchers have multiple methodologies from which to study a research question and are not confined to choosing a single method. The advent of social media data, the cross-pollination of methods (e.g., mixed methods) as well as the importing of methodologies used in sociology, marketing, economics, finance, fine arts, and psychology provide exciting new research opportunities. As such, it is imperative that we keep up with these advances so that our research remains current, relevant, and insightful. In this introductory article to the special issue, we look back at the methods we have commonly employed and look forward to methodologies we may want to investigate as new data and technologies become available.

Methodologies Used To Date in Business and Society Research

The business and society field is a very heterogeneous one, characterized by a wide range of research approaches and methodologies. It is also a very broad field with indistinct boundaries (Crane, Henriques, Husted, & Matten, 2015a). As such, it is difficult to provide a full account of the richness and diversity of ways in which business and society scholars have sought to empirically understand the field. Nonetheless, it is possible to give some indication of methodological scope and trends by examining past reviews of the field and indeed exploring our own backfile of published work.

There has yet to be a comprehensive review of methodologies in the broad business and society field. There have, however, been reviews, analysis, and critique of methods used in subsections of the field such as business ethics (Collins, 2000; Crane, 1999; Randall & Gibson, 1990; Robertson, 1993), CSR (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; De Bakker, Groenwegen, & den Hond, 2005; Egri & Ralston, 2008; Lockett, Moon, & Visser, 2006; Taneja, Taneja, & Gupta, 2011; Wang, Tong, Takeuchi, & George, 2016), cross-sector partnerships (Branzei & Le Ber, 2013; Kourula & Laasonen, 2010), social and ethical entrepreneurship (Hannafey, 2003; Short, Moss, & Lumpkin, 2009), sustainability reporting (Hahn & Kühnen, 2013), nonmarket strategy literature (Mellahi, Frynas, Sun, & Siegel, 2016), and even more specific areas of interest such as the base of the pyramid concept (Kolk, Rivera-Santos, & Rufín, 2014) and workplace harassment (Neall & Tuckey, 2014). Some of these review articles are specifically dedicated to reviewing methodological issues, while others include methodology among other considerations, including theory, common themes, and field development.

In addition to these reviews of the field, there have also been a number of specific methodological reviews on the measurement of specific variables or the testing of specific models or relationships. Most obviously, this has included reviews of the measurement of corporate social performance (Wood, 2010) and its relationship with corporate financial performance (Margolis & Walsh, 2003; Orlitzky, Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003; Ullmann, 1985). Methodological questions remain topical in exploring this relationship, as exemplified by the articles in our own recent thematic issue on measurement issues in corporate social performance research (Capelle-Blancard & Petit, 2017; Mattingly, 2017; Rost & Ehrmann, 2017; Shahzad & Sharfman, 2017).

So what do these studies tell us about the state of methodology in business and society research? A clear picture is a little difficult to discern, but six key trends are apparent: (a) empirical research is growing and becoming more international, (b) research is evenly divided between empirical and conceptual work, (c) quantitative methods are the predominant empirical approach, (d) qualitative methods (case studies) are predominant in new and emerging subfields of business and society, (e) most empirical research draws on a small selection of methods, and (f) major methodological problems persist in the field. We will explain these below before going on to examine how the articles in this special issue address some of these themes.

First, it is worth noting that empirical research in general is on the rise in business and society scholarship. In many respects, this is because business and society research as a whole is increasing in prominence and is increasingly global in scope. For example, the country contexts of articles on CSR published in the Academy of Management have diversified substantially over the past decade so that non-U.S. contexts now account for as many articles as U.S. contexts (Wang et al., 2016). Egri and Ralston’s (2008) review notes that even a decade ago, as many as 117 countries had been the subject of empirical work on corporate responsibility.

Second, it is interesting to note that the business and society field has comprised quite a balanced mix of empirical and nonempirical journal articles. This has some variations across different subfields and journals, but a number of studies note that similar numbers of conceptual and empirical papers have been published (Collins, 2000; Lockett et al., 2006). Within the field, specific journals have operated different editorial policies and have published very different ratios of theoretical to empirical articles. Business & Society, for example, has historically published a large proportion of empirically based research. In recent years, this has ranged from a ratio of 3:1 for empirical articles to conceptual articles in 2014 to a ratio of 6:1 in 2015.

Third, while there is a good range of both quantitative and qualitative methods in the business and society field, quantitative methods are predominant. Lockett and colleagues’ (2006) review of the CSR literature, for example, concludes that “the empirical research has been overwhelmingly of a quantitative nature” (p. 115). Their analysis of articles over the period from 1992 to 2002 found just 20% of all empirical papers was based on qualitative research. Egri and Ralston (2008, p. 323) advance a similar finding based on their analysis of the international management research on corporate responsibility over a slightly later 10-year period. They conclude that “the focus of international management CR empirical research has been predominantly quantitative analyses of primary data.”¹ Similarly, Business Ethics Quarterly reports that it has published few articles based on qualitative research and that they account for only around 18% of submissions to the journal (Reinecke, Arnold, & Palazzo, 2016). Finally, Business & Society too has tended to publish a much greater proportion of quantitative research. In 2016, for example, the journal published 3 times as many articles based on quantitative methods than qualitative methods.

Fourth, in contrast to the field as a whole, it is clear that empirical methods in relatively new areas of research within the field tend to be dominated by qualitative research early on and only later begin to turn to quantitative studies. For example, Kolk and colleagues (2014) in their review of the first decade of research on business at the base of the pyramid identify only four large-sample studies and a “prevalence of . . . case study based articles.” (p. 348). Likewise, Short and colleagues’ (2009) review of the first 18 years of social entrepreneurship research identified 72 empirical articles of which 60% relied on case study methods, while only 22% used quantitative methods. In cross-sector partnerships too, Branzei and Le Ber’s (2013) study of early research from 1997 to 2012 revealed a “predominantly qualitative” approach to empirical work (p. 243). Such findings are fairly intuitive given that these are phenomenon-driven areas of research. That is, in emerging areas of inquiry, scholars need to first immerse themselves in the field of practice to understand what is going on, so that they can then develop theory that can be subsequently tested with larger scale, quantitative methods.

Fifth, there is a strong bias in the empirical literature toward a relatively small number of methods of data collection and analysis. Among quantitative researchers, surveys tend to dominate especially on topics where third-party data are not available. One early review of methods used in business ethics research revealed that more than 80% of empirical studies relied exclusively on survey data (Randall & Gibson, 1990), while a later study confirmed that surveys remained the primary empirical method for researchers in the field (Collins, 2000). For those interested in corporate social performance, proprietary databases from social ratings agencies have become the main source of data (Chatterji, Durand, Levine, & Touboul, 2016). Interestingly, we are now observing greater secondary data collection in empirical business and society research with some researchers blending CSR databases with financial/economic databases to develop and test their hypotheses. For qualitative researchers, most research is case study based, relying on interviews and, to a lesser extent, secondary data. As Bass and Milosevic (2018) conclude from their review of qualitative studies in CSR research, the empirical approach “has largely been monomethodological, utilizing interviews as the sole data source for inquiry” (p. 6).

Sixth, and finally, rigor remains a problem with respect to methodology. This is most notable in relatively new subfields such as social entrepreneurship, base of the pyramid, and cross-sector partnerships where reviews have identified a lack of formal hypotheses or propositions in research design (Short et al., 2009), a lack of analytical depth beyond basic description (Branzei & Le Ber, 2013), and limited use of large-scale datasets (Kourula & Laasonen, 2010). Even in the more mature areas of the field such as CSR and corporate social performance (CSP), debates continue about the precision of measures and methods used in empirical research, with some demonstrating that there is a reporting bias toward win–win results (Rost & Ehrmann, 2017), and others uncovering serious validity problems with social ratings data (Chatterji et al., 2016). Therefore, while it is certainly evident that while there are numerous studies in our field that are far more methodologically advanced than those of 10 or 20 years ago, there is still significant cause for concern with respect to the quality of the bulk of research. For example, in a recent replication of Waddock and Graves (1997) using a larger sample over a longer time period, Zhao and Murrell (2016) find that the relationship between CSR engagement and financial performance (FP) is not generalizable to different samples.

Overall then, the business and society field is open to methodological diversity, but for one reason or another is characterized by quite a high degree of methodological conservatism relative to the broader social and behavioral sciences. Most researchers continue to use the same methods that have become common in the field, despite the problems that have been identified with these approaches—and often without even acknowledging these problems. At the same time, some of the more interesting contributions from our field that have been successful in achieving publication in top-tier journals have been distinctive in either adopting innovative or unusual methodical approaches (Crilly, Hansen, & Zollo, 2016; De Roeck, El Akremi, & Swaen, 2016), exploring novel contexts (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Vaccaro & Palazzo, 2015), or applying existing approaches with an uncommon degree of rigor and insight (Chin, Hambrick, & Treviño, 2013; Kölbel, Busch, & Jancso, 2017; Schüssler, Rüling, & Wittneben, 2014).

Given these developments, we believe there is a clear need for new methodological approaches to be developed and utilized in our field, as well as for existing best practices to be better disseminated. In this special issue, we sought to uncover these areas of innovation and best practice and help bring them into the mainstream of business and society scholarship. In the following section, we will discuss some of the theoretical and methodological challenges faced in our field and how the contributions in this special issue help address them.

The Contributions: Conundrums and Methodological Approaches

The Quants and Poets call for papers challenged researchers to advance quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods and methodologies in business and society research. We received 24 manuscripts of which six were accepted—two quants, three poets, and one quant and poet. The conundrum each of the papers sought to address and the methodological approach taken are discussed below.

Quants

Research in business and society has occurred largely at the organizational, industry, and even country levels of analysis. Unfortunately, the individual level of analysis has been largely neglected. This focus has had important consequences for research in the area as researchers have turned to secondary data and survey research. The first source of data relies heavily on proxies—such as a social investment, a social practice, and a social result—that never quite match the theoretical constructs, while the latter is filled with problems related to common method bias. Furthermore, both approaches are plagued by endogeneity, casting doubts on the robustness of the conclusions reached in many prior studies. Oll, Hahn, Reimsbach, and Kotzian (2018) address these concerns by proposing factorial surveys as a method for taking into account the individual level of analysis and bridging to the organizational and other levels. They provide for a more careful examination of the mechanisms that drive theoretical relationships and additionally reduce concerns about endogeneity by using experimental designs. As business and society seeks to advance theory, this article offers an important remedy to many of the challenges researchers face.

The rapid rise in the use of social media over the last 20 years has also provided a new and potentially rich source of individual-level data for business and society researchers. To date, the use of such data in scholarly studies in the field has been quite limited, with scholars still relying primarily on well-established quantitative and qualitative data sources such as financial data, government statistics, news media articles, company reports, ratings agency data, and interview data. Social media data, however, potentially open up the possibilities for examining new questions about business and society or examining existing questions in new ways.

In their article titled “Measuring Organizational Legitimacy in Social Media: Assessing Citizens’ Judgments With Sentiment Analysis,” Etter, Colleoni, Illia, Meggiorin, and D’Eugenio (2018) take the latter route and provide a fresh perspective on measuring organizational legitimacy. Their argument is that social media have to some extent enabled the public to bypass traditional broadcasting gatekeepers and thereby express their individual legitimacy judgments through media such as blogs, tweets, Facebook, or Instagram posts. The authors propose the use of sentiment analysis of Twitter data to gain a direct measure of the legitimacy of companies from the perspective of individual citizens. They demonstrate through an illustrative study of an Italian bank how this approach can give new and sometimes quite different insights compared with our traditional legitimacy measures. Such insights point to just some of the many opportunities (but also challenges) that arise with using social media data in business and society research and we are certain to see many more studies in the future using such data—and hopefully, further refining our methods.

Poets

Qualitative methods have considerable potential for understanding business and society issues in specific contexts. However, much qualitative research in the field, and in management more broadly, tends to hide the context-dependent nature of their studies. Such research often fails to deal effectively with the normative concerns of the authors or of the subjects they are studying. Instead of providing a critique of present theory, qualitative research sometimes allows scholars to confirm preconceived notions shared by others in the same historical context. By varying the historical context, researchers are confronted both with their own normative stances and those of their subjects. Stutz and Sachs (2018) skillfully delineate these concerns about contemporary qualitative research as practiced in management studies and propose the use of reflexive historical case studies to overcome these concerns by dealing explicitly with these normative challenges. By encouraging the use of historical contexts to challenge researchers’ assumptions, this article offers business and society scholars with a valuable approach to develop new and original ideas in the field.

McCarthy and Muthuri (2018) raise another important criticism of existing business and society research, which is that it tends to ignore those with less voice such as women in developing countries, the nonliterate, indigenous peoples, and so on. Such “fringe stakeholders” (Hart & Sharma, 2004) are difficult to reach and engaging them meaningfully in scholarly research is not always possible with traditional data collection techniques. Their article proposes a possible solution to this problem by exploring the use of visual participatory research methods. Such methods, which include enabling participants to use drawings and symbols to depict their lived experiences, are shown by the authors to offer the potential for more inclusive research designs. The approach draws both from a growing trend toward visual methods in organization research and participative research methods in development studies to offer a novel approach for use in business and society research. As business and society increasingly moves into new contexts, the article shows just how important it is to keep developing and refining new methods to successfully conduct robust and relevant research that fits the context.

The question of contextual fit is also addressed by Bass and Milosevic (2018) in their article, “The Ethnographic Method in CSR Research: The Role and Importance of Methodological Fit.” Ethnography has a long but difficult history in business and society research where it has struggled for impact despite ongoing attempts by qualitative researchers to bring more ethnographic approaches into the field. The authors argue that ethnography should play a more central role in understanding how culture, practices, and interaction shape CSR but that the reality is that few genuine ethnographical studies have been published in the literature to date, even if qualitative research as a whole is thriving. They therefore offer a new framework that should act as a spur for ethnographic research in the field. Crucially, they show how different types of ethnographies—realist, impressionist, and critical—are based on different epistemological positions, are appropriate to answer different types of questions, and give rise to quite different types of research outcomes. Such insights help open up the ethnographic method for business and society researchers and provide alternative road maps for how to adopt the method in practice.

Quants and Poets

Mixed methods research is an approach where the “researcher designs a study that mixes or combines quantitative and qualitative methods, techniques, concepts, or language into a single study or series of linked studies” (Fakis, Hilliam, Stoneley, & Townend, 2013, p. 139). The popularity of mixed methods in management is growing (Molina-Azorin, 2012). From a research design perspective, there are three ways that researchers can blend qualitative and quantitative approaches. The first is to use qualitative methods before quantitative methods to develop hypotheses, explore concepts, define terminologies, and describe contexts. The second is to use qualitative research methods alongside quantitative research methods to explain, illuminate, or qualify/illustrate a phenomenon. The third approach uses qualitative methods after quantitative results are available to follow-up on a subgroup of interest, explore unexplained statistical relationships, or illuminate decisions and processes.

The digital age has increased the amount of big data researchers can use from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook and information aggregators such as Bloomberg. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that methods blending quantitative techniques with qualitative data are being developed. Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is one such example. QCA is a methodology that uses set theory to take into account the fact that multiple conditions combine to produce outcomes. Unlike regression-based methods where the researcher seeks to identify general patterns of causation that apply to all contexts, QCA identifies the configurations of conditions associated with an outcome of interest (Crilly, Zollo, & Hansen, 2012; Maggetti, 2014). This approach is especially useful for business and society research as it is amenable to multilevel theory analysis (Lacey & Fiss, 2009).

In their article, “Organizational Configurations for Sustainability and Labor Productivity: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis Approach,” Delmas and Pekovic (2018) highlight the fact that CSR research has often examined individual organizational practices such as environmental management practices and their impact on organizational performance in isolation. Such an approach, however, ignores the possible existing complementary organizational mechanisms within an organization which could lead to mis-specified models. QCA allows the modeler to accommodate complex complementarities and nonlinear relationships among constructs so that the researcher can analyze the causal contribution of different configurations of conditions to an outcome of interest—a more holistic approach. Delmas and Pekovic find that higher labor productivity results when environmental practices are combined with other management practices such as quality management practices and teamwork. Such insights are useful for business and society researchers who seek to understand the organizational performance of CSR practices as a whole rather than in isolation.

The Future of Business and Society Research

So where do we see methods and methodologies going in the field? To a great extent, the new methods will respond to the real-world problems and challenges that lie ahead. Clearly, measuring social impact is one major challenge that business and society researchers will have to tackle better in the future. The use of secondary databases has enabled enormous advances in the field, but KLD, Asset4, Bloomberg Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data, and so on, are not enough. Research by Chatterji and colleagues (2016) suggests that these databases do not always accurately predict social performance. Furthermore, these data are plagued with the challenges of aggregation of different kinds of performance (Carroll, Primo, & Richter, 2016; Chen & Delmas, 2011). As we move from concerns over measuring the social performance of firms to the measurement of their actual social impact on the ground, the challenges become even more acute. Examples include the impacts of technological adoption and globalization on income inequality, and the impacts of financial crises and ethical controversies on a community’s social fabric and cohesion. Any shift from company-oriented output measures to community or ecosystem outcome and impact measures raises a host of conceptual, methodological, and practical problems (Van Tulder, Seitanidi, Crane, & Brammer, 2015).

A second major challenge is that many issues of interest in business and society, like income inequality and climate change, are systemic in nature and cannot be reduced to a single regression. We can measure the emissions of a firm or the number of work-related injuries, but we cannot speak to its impact on the whole system. Many problems are systemic in nature, and measurements at the firm or individual level will not reveal how well the system is functioning as a whole. So, although income inequality may be measured within firms, it is very difficult to get a sense of the extent to which firms contribute to income inequality overall. Simply looking at firm-level measures may blind analysts to the contributions of firms to their impact on the system where the problem resides. For example, there has been a renaissance in systems thinking approaches (Jackson, 2003; Senge, 1990; Senge & Carstedt, 2001) where the focus of the analysis is not on the constituent of a system (e.g., a firm action or product) but rather on how that constituent interacts with other constituents in the system of which it is part (e.g., the natural environment or other stakeholders).

Finally, there is a need for more theoretically informed empirical research. For too long, scholars in the field have not connected to each other by addressing the theoretical implications of their research. Theory and data have tended to proceed separately rather than in tandem (Gond & Crane, 2010). Business & Society has responded to this challenge by requiring that all manuscripts accepted for publication advance the development of relevant theory. Theoretically informed research will allow for the more rapid accumulation of knowledge and the possibility of relatively ad hoc projects to build into a more coherent whole. For example, replicating an empirical study using data from another country does meet this challenge. On the contrary, providing a theoretical explanation as to why the original study’s model may or may not apply in a different context would contribute to the extant literature (Crane, Henriques, Husted, & Matten, 2016).

Given such challenges, methods in the field will clearly need to evolve. In addition to the new methodological emphases highlighted in this special issue, the field is wide open for many new methods that have been relatively unexplored in business and society research. While much will depend on the types of research questions we ask, the training that business and society scholars receive, and the openness to novel methods on the part of gatekeepers such as journal editors, there are some avenues that we believe could be particularly ripe for exploration. These avenues include methods imported from other disciplines such as geography and public health, new social media analytics, quasi-experimental methods, mixed methods, alternative qualitative methods, and action research.

New methods often enter management research from neighboring fields. Spatial methods from economic geography have barely begun to make an impact on management scholarship, let alone business and society research (Doh & Hahn, 2008). Yet given significant theoretical advances related to community isomorphism (Marquis, Glynn, & Davis, 2007) and earlier work on embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985), business and society research is ripe to examine how local communities and nearby actors affect CSR engagement by firms. A few recent studies related to the dependence of CSR behavior on the behavior of nearby firms provide some hints as to how this research might proceed (Husted, Jamali, & Saffar, 2016; Husted, Montiel, & Christmann, 2016). Spatial econometric methods allow researchers to determine the extent to which behavior spills over to other firms and to separate the influence of nearby firms from that of the particular jurisdiction within which corporate social behavior takes place.

Methods imported from health studies and public policy could also be better utilized in business and society research in the future. As we discussed before, measuring social impact continues to present an important challenge in our field. When one thinks about corporate social impact, we often forget about hard, on-the-ground facts related to people and their quality of life. Ward (1988) argued that health outcomes were the bottom-line measure for the public policy. Just as environmental issues, such as toxic wastes, have been tied to health outcomes, so too have social issues like income inequality been linked to health outcomes (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2006). Still, real social impact based on health outcomes or life capabilities have rarely been used in the literature to evaluate the social impact of CSR initiatives. Doing so would open up tremendous insight into the effectiveness of CSR initiatives.

Social media analysis provides multiple new fronts in which methods can develop. Beyond measuring organizational legitimacy through sentiment analysis (Etter et al., 2018), new methods of analysis of social media data can be used to measure corporate reputation and stakeholder response to corporate action on a daily basis, if not in real time. Work on deontic justice suggests that people respond not only to injustice received personally but also to injustices suffered by third parties (Rupp & Bell, 2010). Thus, social media data could provide a measure of stakeholder reaction to injustice perpetrated by firms and other actors. Social media data could even provide the social equivalent of stock prices in publicly listed exchanges for business and society researchers. They will enable the real-time measurement of stakeholder reactions to specific events, opening up the use of time-series analysis to business and society researchers in a way that has until now only been the domain of financial economists.

Probably one of the most exciting developments for the field will be the increasing use of quasi-experimental designs. Public policy has made tremendous strides in impact evaluation through the use of field experiments and quasi-experimental designs. These methods attempt to simulate the conditions of true experiments through methods such as propensity score matching and difference-in-difference models (Khandker, Koolwal, & Samad, 2009). The application of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to the evaluation of development projects by Esther Duflo and her colleagues has made an enormous impact on the development field (Banerjee & Duflo, 2009) and provides a good model of how impact evaluation can be brought down to the firm and project level of analysis. Their recent study of microfinance provides an excellent illustration of quasi-experimental research that is relevant to business and society research (Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster, & Kinnan, 2015). Closer to home, Geoffrey Kistruck, Sutter, Lount, and Smith (2013) are beginning to apply these methods to business and society problems.

The intersections of qualitative and quantitative research show considerable promise and should provide for a fertile stream of future research in business and society. Two pathways are evident. First, mixed methods studies may offer the potential for providing better understanding of complex business and society problems than single methods alone. That is, mixed methods can either help triangulate across different data sources to address a specific research question or they can provide different empirical perspectives on a common phenomenon. A good example is provided by Crilly et al. (2016) who utilize both quantitative and qualitative data to explore how linguistic framings present in qualitative interviews and sustainability reports are related to quantitative assessments of company sustainability performance by stakeholders. While such mixed methods approaches are gradually increasing in popularity, there is still relatively little understanding of the unique methodological opportunities and challenges they pose (Harrison, 2013). However, research has demonstrated that mixed methods studies, on average, receive more citations than monomethod studies (Molina-Azorin, 2012), and they look likely to be more extensively explored in the future.

Second, as the articles by Delmas and Pekovic (2018) and Etter and colleagues (2018) in this issue demonstrate, there is growing interest in the business and society field in specific methods that bridge quantitative and qualitative research. QCA, which Delmas and Pekovic apply to survey data, has also been applied to “softer” qualitative data such as interviews to try and provide more quantitative robustness to qualitative analysis. Examples from the business and society field include Snelson-Powell, Grosvold, and Millington’s (2016) study of business school responses to sustainability; Crilly et al.’s (2012) study of firm responses to stakeholder pressures; and Crilly’s (2011) analysis of firms’ stakeholder orientations. Likewise, Etter and colleagues’ study in this issue uses quantitative analysis of qualitative data (tweets) drawing on sentiment analysis. In addition to these methods, others are also emerging that seek to cross the quantitative–qualitative divide, such as conversation analysis and computational linguistics, which have yet to be applied in the business and society field.

Of course, qualitative methods in business and society research should not be simply seen as either a preliminary phase for the “real” business of quantitative hypothesis testing or a source of data that can be most rigorously analyzed using quantitative methods. Qualitative methods have a vital role to play in developing and refining theory in the field in their own right. As we look to the future, however, qualitative research in business and society will need to become both more adventurous and more robust to achieve these goals.

There is clearly at present a heavy reliance on case studies and interview-based studies among qualitative researchers in business and society. This is not surprising given the challenges of publishing qualitative research in top journals—Authors can increase the chance of publication by approximating as far as possible a standard boilerplate for qualitative research given such journals are not perceived as rewarding methodological diversity (Pratt, 2008). However, there is considerable overlooked potential in alternative approaches to qualitative research that are being deployed to good use across management studies but have yet to make much headway into the business and society field. These approaches include visual methods, participant and nonparticipant observations, discourse analysis, archival studies, and netnography, among others (see, for example, Elsbach & Kramer, 2015). The articles in this special issue showcase some of these methods, but there is clearly a long way to go before the qualitative side of our field becomes sufficiently heterogeneous to take account of the very wide diversity of issues, contexts, and actors that characterize our area of study.

Finally, with respect to robustness, qualitative researchers in business and society are making progress, but challenges remain for the future. As Cornelissen (2017) argues in relation to management research more generally, a quest for perceived robustness has led qualitative papers in top management journals to increasingly be styled in the image of quantitative research. This has had the effect of limiting certain forms of theorizing and explanation to the detriment of knowledge development. Given the dominance of quantitative methods in business and society research to date, our field runs a similar risk. Therefore, it is incumbent upon qualitative researchers to more clearly connect their methodological approach to research with their approach to or style of theorizing and to follow the appropriate robustness criteria needed to harness the full potential of the qualitative research.

A promising methodology that combines adventurousness and robustness is action research. Action research “aims to contribute to both the practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to the goals of social science by joint collaboration within a mutually acceptable ethical framework” (Rapoport, 1970, p. 499). The main difference between qualitative research and action research is that qualitative research is about practice, not with practitioners, while action research always includes practitioners as partners in the co-creation of knowledge (Bradbury-Huang, 2010). Participatory action research methodology is ideal for business and society research in that it is future oriented in dealing with the community’s concerns, is collaborative, implies system development, generates theory grounded in action by evaluating the veracity of existing theories, and is situational in that context where relationships among stakeholders matter (Susman & Evered, 1978). According to Whyte, Greenwood, and Lazes (1991), “participatory action research is not an alternative to existing [traditional] social science but a way of dramatically enhancing our achievement of the goals of theoretical understanding and social betterment by widening the range of strategies at our disposal” (p. 54). Such an approach allows researchers to co-create a research framework that reflects participants’ worldviews while benefiting participants. Examples of research that may benefit from this approach include research involving communities at the base of the pyramid and indigenous peoples. Aguiñaga, Henriques, Scheel, and Scheel (2017), for example, employ action research to assess, theoretically and empirically, the governance approach needed in the development of a circular economy in a rural community in Mexico.

One of the main criticisms of action research is that it does not meet the scientific rigor established by positivist science (Aguinis, 1993). However, as noted by Aguinis (1993), action research and the scientific method are complementary because both approaches use qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis and longitudinal research designs. The complexity of business and society research, in fact, is well suited for an open systems approach—which is a scientific framework—to organizations in which a multidisciplinary team of researchers come together with the organization in question to form a more holistic understanding of organizational phenomena.

In sum, business and society research poses some critical challenges for scholars, but the articles in this special issue, and the opportunities we have identified for further methodological advances, suggest that the future could be very promising indeed. However, business and society researchers will have to rise to the challenge of moving beyond their existing comfort zone and explore new pathways of methodological pluralism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Andrew Crane (PhD, University of Nottingham) is a professor of business and society and director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society at the School of Management, University of Bath, UK. He is currently a coeditor of Business & Society. His research deals, among other things, with corporate responsibility, business ethics, cross-sector partnerships, responsible consumption, and business and modern slavery. He has published in such journals as Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies.

Irene Henriques (PhD, Queen’s University) is a professor of sustainability and economics at the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. She is a distinguished visiting star professor at the EGADE Business School of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico, and a coeditor of Business & Society. Her research interests span economics, stakeholder management, and sustainability. She has published numerous articles in leading economic and management journals, including the American Economic Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, and Strategic Management Journal.

Bryan W. Husted (PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a professor of management at the EGADE Business School of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. He is currently a coeditor of Business & Society. His research deals with corporate social responsibility, business ethics, and corporate sustainability. He has published in such journals as Business & Society, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal.

Reviewers for the Special Issue

Twenty-four articles were submitted for consideration to the Special Issue, of which six were accepted for publication. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the reviewers who so generously helped us in this endeavor. We would also like to thank Jonathan Doh for his thoughtful review of this introduction to the special issue.

Anne Barraquier

Emma Bell

Stephen Brammer

Arturo Briseno

Jill Brown

Marcelo Bucheli

Craig Carroll

Itziar Castello

Donal Crilly

Shuili Du

Paul Dunn

Helen Etchanchu Schneider

Christian Fieseler

Adam Fremeth

Katherina Glac

Stefan Gold

Jennifer Griffin

Tobias Hahn

Nardia Haigh

Pursey Heugens

Phil Johnson

Bahar Ali Kazmi

Celine Louche

Peter Lund-Thomsen

Karen Maas

Giacomo Manetti

Diana Mangalagiu

Mauricio Maronne

Bill Martello

Mollie Painter-Morland

Ajnesh Prasad

Lutz Preuss

Martin Reimann

Rommel Salvador

Judith Schrempf-Stirling

Kosheek Sewchurran

Angelique Slade Shantz

Vivek Soundararajan

David Stiles

Mark Tadajewski

Caterina Tantalo

Suzanne Tilleman

Sarah Tischer

Helen Tregidga

Hannah Trittin

Rob van Tulder

Daniel Wadhwani

Matthew Wallis

Samantha Warren

Tony Watson

References

Aguiñaga

Henriques

Scheel

(2017). Building resilience: A self-sustainable community approach to the triple bottom line. Journal of Cleaner Production. Advance online publication. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.01.094

Aguinis

(1993). Action research and scientific method: Presumed discrepancies and actual similarities. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 29, 416-431.

Aguinis

Glavas

(2012). What we know and don’t know about corporate social responsibility: A review and research agenda. Journal of Management, 38, 932-968.

Banerjee

A. V.

Duflo

(2009). The experimental approach to development economics. Annual Review of Economics, 1, 151-178.

Banerjee

A. V.

Duflo

Glennerster

Kinnan

(2015). The miracle of microfinance? Evidence from a randomized evaluation. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7, 22-53.

Bass

A. E.

Milosevic

(2018). The Ethnographic Method in CSR Research: The Role and Importance of Methodological Fit. Business & Society, 57, 174–215.

Bluhm

D. J.

Harman

Lee

T. W.

Mitchell

T. R.

(2011). Qualitative research in management: A decade of progress. Journal of Management Studies, 48, 1866-1891.

Bradbury-Huang

(2010). What is good action research? Why the resurgent interest? Action Research, 8, 93-109.

Branzei

Le Ber

M. J.

(2013). Theory-method interfaces in cross-sector partnership research. In Seitanidi

M. M.

Crane

(Eds.), Social partnerships and responsible business: A research handbook (pp. 229-266). London, England: Routledge.

10.

Capelle-Blancard

Petit

(2017). The weighting of CSR dimensions. Business & Society, 56, 919-943. doi:10.1177/0007650315620118

11.

Carroll

R. J.

Primo

D. M.

Richter

B. K.

(2016). Using item response theory to improve measurement in strategic management research: An application to corporate social responsibility. Strategic Management Journal, 37, 66-85.

12.

Chatterji

A. K.

Durand

Levine

D. I.

Touboul

(2016). Do ratings of firms converge? Implications for managers, investors and strategy researchers. Strategic Management Journal, 37, 1597-1614.

13.

Chen

C. M.

Delmas

(2011). Measuring corporate social performance: An efficiency perspective. Production and Operations Management, 20, 789-804.

14.

Chin

M. K.

Hambrick

D. C.

Treviño

L. K.

(2013). Political ideologies of CEOs: The influence of executives’ values on corporate social responsibility. Administrative Science Quarterly, 58, 197-232.

15.

Collins

(2000). The quest to improve the human condition: The first 1500 articles published in Journal of Business Ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 26, 1-73.

16.

Cornelissen

J. P.

(2017). Preserving theoretical divergence in management research: Why the explanatory potential of qualitative research should be harnessed rather than suppressed. Journal of Management Studies, 54, 368-383. doi:10.1111/joms.12210

17.

Crane

(1999). Are you ethical? Please tick yes or no on researching ethics in business organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 20, 237-248.

18.

Crane

Henriques

Husted

B. W.

Matten

(2015a). Defining the scope of Business & Society. Business & Society, 54, 427-434.

19.

Crane

Henriques

Husted

B. W.

Matten

(2015b). A new era for Business & Society. Business & Society, 54, 3-8.

20.

Crane

Henriques

Husted

B. W.

Matten

(2016). Publishing country studies in Business & Society: Or, do we care about CSR in Mongolia? Business & Society, 55, 3-10.

21.

Crilly

(2011). Predicting stakeholder orientation in the multinational enterprise: A mid-range theory. Journal of International Business Studies, 42, 694-717.

22.

Crilly

Hansen

Zollo

(2016). The grammar of decoupling: A cognitive-linguistic perspective on firms’ sustainability claims and stakeholders’ interpretation. Academy of Management Journal, 59, 705-729.

23.

Crilly

Zollo

Hansen

M. T.

(2012). Faking it or muddling through? Understanding decoupling in response to stakeholder pressures. Academy of Management Journal, 55, 1429-1448.

24.

De Bakker

G. A.

Groenwegen

den Hond

. (2005). A bibliometric analysis of 30 years of research and theory on corporate social responsibility and corporate social performance. Business & Society, 44, 283-317.

25.

Delmas

M. A.

Pekovic

(2018). Organizational configurations for sustainability and employee productivity: A qualitative comparative analysis approach. Business & Society, 57, 216–251.

26.

De Roeck

El Akremi

Swaen

. (2016). Consistency matters! How and when does corporate social responsibility affect employees’ organizational identification? Journal of Management Studies, 53, 1141-1168.

27.

Doh

J. P.

Hahn

E. D.

(2008). Using spatial methods in strategy research. Organizational Research Methods, 11, 659-681.

28.

Egri

C. P.

Ralston

D. A.

(2008). Corporate responsibility: A review of international management research from 1998 to 2007. Journal of International Management, 14, 319-339.

29.

Eisenhardt

K. M.

Graebner

M. E.

Sonenshein

(2016). Grand challenges and inductive methods: Rigor without rigor mortis. Academy of Management Journal, 59, 1113-1123.

30.

Elsbach

K. D.

Kramer

R. M.

(2015). Handbook of qualitative organizational research: Innovative pathways and methods. London, England: Routledge.

31.

Etter

Colleoni

Illia

Meggiorin

D’Eugenio

(2018). Measuring Organizational Legitimacy in Social Media: Assessing Citizens’ Judgments With Sentiment Analysis. Business & Society, 57, 60–97.

32.

Fakis

Hilliam

Stoneley

Townend

(2013). Quantitative analysis of qualitative information from interviews: A systematic literature review. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 8, 139-161.

33.

Gond

J. P.

Crane

(2010). Corporate social performance disoriented: Saving the lost paradigm? Business & Society, 49, 677-703.

34.

Granovetter

(1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481-510.

35.

Hahn

Kühnen

(2013). Determinants of sustainability reporting: A review of results, trends, theory, and opportunities in an expanding field of research. Journal of Cleaner Production, 59, 5-21.

36.

Hannafey

F. T.

(2003). Entrepreneurship and ethics: A literature review. Journal of Business Ethics, 46(2), 99-110.

37.

Harrison

R. L.

III . (2013). Using mixed methods designs in the Journal of Business Research, 1990–2010. Journal of Business Research, 66, 2153-2162.

38.

Hart

S. L.

Sharma

(2004). Engaging fringe stakeholders for competitive imagination. Academy of Management Executive, 18, 7-18.

39.

Husted

B. W.

Jamali

Saffar

(2016). Near and dear? The role of location in CSR engagement. Strategic Management Journal, 37, 2050-2070.

40.

Husted

B. W.

Montiel

Christmann

(2016). Effects of local legitimacy on certification decisions to global and national CSR standards by multinational subsidiaries and domestic firms. Journal of International Business Studies, 47, 382-397.

41.

Jackson

M. C.

(2003). Systems thinking: Creative holism for managers. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley.

42.

Khandker

S. R.

Koolwal

G. B.

Samad

H. A.

(2009). Handbook on impact evaluation: Quantitative methods and practices. New York, NY: World Bank Publications.

43.

Kistruck

G. M.

Sutter

C. J.

Lount

R. B.

Smith

B. R.

(2013). Mitigating principal-agent problems in base-of-the-pyramid markets: An identity spillover perspective. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 659-682.

44.

Kölbel

J. F.

Busch

Jancso

L. M.

(2017). How media coverage of corporate social irresponsibility increases financial risk. Strategic Management Journal. 38, 2266–2284.

45.

Kolk

Rivera-Santos

Rufín

(2014). Reviewing a decade of research on the “base/bottom of the pyramid” (BOP) concept. Business & Society, 53, 338-377.

46.

Kourula

Laasonen

(2010). Nongovernmental organizations in Business & Society, management, and international business research—Review and implications from 1998 to 2007. Business & Society, 49, 35-67.

47.

Lacey

Fiss

P. C.

(2009). Comparative organizational analysis across multiple levels: A set-theoretic approach. In King

Felin

Whetten

(Eds.), Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 26: Studying differences between organizations: Comparative approaches to organizational research (pp. 91-116). Bingley, UK: Emerald.

48.

Lockett

Moon

Visser

(2006). Corporate social responsibility in management research: Focus, nature, salience, and sources of influence. Journal of Management Studies, 43, 115-136.

49.

Maggetti

(2014). Promoting corporate responsibility in private banking: Necessary and sufficient conditions for joining the Wolfsberg initiative against money laundering. Business & Society, 53, 787-819.

50.

Margolis

J. D.

Walsh

J. P.

(2003). Misery loves companies: Rethinking social initiatives by business. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48, 268-305.

51.

Marquis

Glynn

M. A.

Davis

G. F.

(2007). Community isomorphism and corporate social action. Academy of Management Review, 32, 925-945.

52.

Mattingly

J. E.

(2017). Corporate social performance: A review of empirical research examining the corporation—Society relationship using Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini social ratings data. Business & Society, 56, 796-839. doi:10.1177/0007650315585761

53.

McCarthy

Muthuri

J. N.

(2018). Engaging fringe stakeholders in Business & Society research: Applying visual participatory research methods. Business & Society, 57, 131–173.

54.

Mellahi

Frynas

J. G.

Sun

Siegel

(2016). A review of the nonmarket strategy literature: Toward a multi-theoretical integration. Journal of Management, 42, 143-173.

55.

Molina-Azorin

J. F.

(2012). Mixed methods research in strategic management: Impact and applications. Organizational Research Methods, 15, 33-56.

56.

Neall

A. M.

Tuckey

M. R.

(2014). A methodological review of research on the antecedents and consequences of workplace harassment. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 87, 225-257.

57.

Oll

Hahn

Reimsbach

Kotzian

(2018). Tackling Complexity in Business and Society Research: The Methodological and Thematic Potential of Factorial Surveys. Business & Society, 57, 26–59.

58.

Orlitzky

Schmidt

F. L.

Rynes

S. L.

(2003). Corporate social and financial performance: A meta-analysis. Organization Studies, 24, 403-411.

59.

Pratt

M. G.

(2008). Fitting oval pegs into round holes: Tensions in evaluating and publishing qualitative research in top-tier North American journals. Organizational Research Methods, 11, 481-509.

60.

Randall

D. M.

Gibson

A. M.

(1990). Methodology in business ethics research: A review and critical assessment. Journal of Business Ethics, 9, 457-471.

61.

Rapoport

R. N.

(1970). Three dilemmas in action research. Human Relations, 23, 499-513.

62.

Redlich-Amirav

Higginbottom

(2014). New emerging technologies in qualitative research. The Qualitative Report, 19(26), 1-14.

63.

Reinecke

Ansari

(2016). Taming wicked problems: The role of framing in the construction of corporate social responsibility. Journal of Management Studies, 53, 299-329.

64.

Reinecke

Arnold

D. G.

Palazzo

(2016). Qualitative methods in business ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability research. Business Ethics Quarterly, 26(4), xiii-xxii.

65.

Robertson

D. C.

(1993). Empiricism in business ethics: Suggested research directions. Journal of Business Ethics, 12, 585-599.

66.

Rost

Ehrmann

(2017). Reporting biases in empirical management research. Business & Society, 56, 840-888. doi:10.1177/0007650315572858

67.

Rupp

D. E.

Bell

C. M.

(2010). Extending the deontic model of justice: Moral self-regulation in third-party responses to injustice. Business Ethics Quarterly, 20, 89-106.

68.

Schüssler

Rüling

C.-C.

Wittneben

B. B.

(2014). On melting summits: The limitations of field-configuring events as catalysts of change in transnational climate policy. Academy of Management Journal, 57, 140-171.

69.

Senge

P. M.

(1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. London, England: Random House.

70.

Senge

P. M.

Carstedt

(2001). Innovating our way to the next industrial revolution. MIT Sloan Management Review, 42(2), 24-38.

71.

Shahzad

A. M.

Sharfman

M. P.

(2017). Corporate social performance and financial performance. Business & Society, 56, 889-918. doi:10.1177/0007650315590399

72.

Short

J. C.

Moss

T. W.

Lumpkin

G. T.

(2009). Research in social entrepreneurship: Past contributions and future opportunities. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 3, 161-194.

73.

Snelson-Powell

Grosvold

Millington

(2016). Business school legitimacy and the challenge of sustainability: A fuzzy set analysis of institutional decoupling. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15, 703-723.

74.

Stutz

Sachs

(2018). Facing the Normative Challenges: The Potential of Reflexive Historical Research. Business & Society 57, 98–130.

75.

Susman

G. I.

Evered

R. D.

(1978). An assessment of the scientific merits of action research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23, 582-603.

76.

Taneja

S. S.

Taneja

P. K.

Gupta

R. K.

(2011). Researches in corporate social responsibility: A review of shifting focus, paradigms, and methodologies. Journal of Business Ethics, 101, 343-364.

77.

Ullmann

A. A.

(1985). Data in search of a theory: A critical examination of the relationships among social performance, social disclosure, and economic performance of U.S. firms. Academy of Management Review, 10, 540-557.

78.

Vaccaro

Palazzo

(2015). Values against violence: Institutional change in societies dominated by organized crime. Academy of Management Journal, 58, 1075-1101.

79.

Van Maanen

. (1979). Reclaiming qualitative methods for organizational research: A preface. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 520-526.

80.

Van Tulder

Seitanidi

M. M.

Crane

Brammer

. (2015). Enhancing the impact of cross-sector partnerships: Four impact loops for channeling partnership studies. Journal of Business Ethics, 135, 1-17.

81.

Waddock

S. A.

Graves

S. B.

(1997). The corporate social performance—Financial performance link. Strategic Management Journal, 18, 303-319.

82.

Wang

Tong

Takeuchi

George

(2016). Corporate social responsibility: An overview and new research directions thematic issue on corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Journal, 59, 534-544.

83.

Ward

(1988). LEP: An alternative criterion for socio-economic valuation. Journal of Economic Issues, 22, 763-780.

84.

Whyte

W. F.

Greenwood

D. J.

Lazes

(1991). Participatory action research: Through practice to science in social research. In Whyte

W. F.

(Ed.), Participatory action research (pp. 19-55). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

85.

Wilkinson

R. G.

Pickett

K. E.

(2006). Income inequality and population health: A review and explanation of the evidence. Social Science & Medicine, 62, 1768-1784.

86.

Wood

D. J.

(2010). Measuring corporate social performance: A review. International Journal of Management Reviews, 12, 50-84.

87.

Zhao

Murrell

A. J.

(2016). Revisiting the corporate social performance-financial performance link: A replication of Waddock and Graves. Strategic Management Journal, 37, 2378-2388.