Toward an Integrative Theory of Value-based Leadership

This chapter takes up where the last left off. Specifically, corporate social performance topics are further reformulated to move inquiry beyond problems of integration and toward a coherent approach that can inform theory and practice, keeping in mind that the mission of the business and society field is to find and develop a constructive business relationship with society. This search is inherently normative, because it seeks to explain what corporations should or should not do on behalf of the social good (Buchholz, 1989; Frederick, 1986; Waddock, 2002; Wood, 199lb). The endeavor necessarily involves factual accounts of corporate activity as well. However, the normative (what corporations should or should not do) and the descriptive (what corporations do or can do) are difficult to blend into one theoretical perspective for corporate social performance, although the approach taken in Chapter 1 can be seen as an important first step toward reconciliation. This dilemma parallels the antagonism between the duty-aligned approach (influenced by ethics research) and the economic perspective (shaped by management research) detailed in that chapter. The conundrum is serious. Many prominent scholars hold that a coherent theory of business and society will be kept at bay until an integration of the normative and descriptive is forged (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1994; Donaldson & Preston, 1995;Frederick, 1994; Freeman, 1994; Jones & Wicks, 1999; Quinn & Jones, 1995).1