Doing Good Does No Harm. About Creating Sustainable Value Through Accountable Management

Reflecting the high complexity, diversity and uncertainty of business and economic conditions, and acknowledging the trend of boundaryless organisations and economic-social systems, we have to move from stakeholder management to stakeholder accountability to let us operate in the turbulent, chaotic environment of the Anthropocene.

The aim of the study is to investigate the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a company’s performance, and its financial standing in particular, based on an extensive academic literature review. The survey proves that stakeholder management, together with its underlying concepts such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), contributes to increasing long-term viability of an organisation’s system, as well as of the system of its environment (including economies and societies). This is of crucial importance in times of crises, such as natural distress, political unrest and pandemics, when a system’s viability is particularly put to the test.

The paper contributes to the discussion about doing well while doing good in business, and concludes that the interests of shareholders and stakeholders can merge through notions of social responsibility and sustainability. This observation can be of high interest to both scholars, educators and practitioners, and contributes to their better understanding of diversified expectations and issues affecting stakeholders across markets, industries, economies and societies, allowing different organisations to act more adaptively and thus accountably towards the more sustainable future.