A Configurational Approach to Corporate Social Responsibility–financial Performance Empirical Research

Empirical research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has addressed, to a large extent, a hypothesized relationship between CSR and financial performance. In these empirical studies, CSR has typically been measured as an aggregate of stakeholder relationships ranging from employees to local communities or governments. The results of these studies attempting to link socially responsible behaviors to either accounting- or market-based measures of financial performance have been ambiguous; ¹ researchers have found positive, negative and neutral relationships.