The DOI matches its Crossref record; 125 of the 125 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Purpose in the For-Profit Firm: A Review and Framework for Management Research
Open accessAbstract
Purpose is a concept often used in managerial communities to signal and define a firm’s benevolent and pluralistic approach to its stakeholders beyond its focus on shareholders. While some evidence has linked purpose to positive organizational outcomes such as growth, employee satisfaction, innovation, and superior stock market performance, the definition and application of purpose in management research has been varied and frequently ambiguous. We review literature streams that invoke purpose in the for-profit firm and propose a unifying definition. Next, we develop a framework to study purpose that decouples its framing and formalization within firms from its realization, thus helping to avoid conflation of the presence of purpose with positive organizational outcomes. The framework also highlights internal and external drivers that shape the framing of purpose as well as the influence of the institutional context on its adoption and effectiveness. Finally, we provide a rich agenda for future research on purpose.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(2010) · Cited by 24,023
Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning
March, J. G. (1991) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.71 · Cited by 21,942 · cited 2×
“…worthwhile to study whether purpose breadth or purpose depth would be perceived more favorably by stakeholders and whether firms who seek to combine depth and breadth would suffer from the exploration/exploitation-like problems identified in the study of organizational ambidexterity (March, 1991).”
Background(1993) · Journal of the American Dietetic Association · doi:10.1016/0002-8223(93)91697-o · Cited by 18,154
Armstrong, J. S., & Georgoff, D. M. (1988) · International Journal of Forecasting · doi:10.1016/0169-2070(88)90019-2 · Cited by 17,894
The Population Ecology of Organizations
Hannan, M. T., & Freeman, J. (1977) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/226424 · Cited by 7,568
From the New York Times Magazine
Minsky, & Hyman, P. (1979) · Cited by 6,899
Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997) · The Academy of Management Review · doi:10.2307/259247 · Cited by 5,039
O'Reilly, C. A., Chatman, J., & Caldwell, D. F. (1991) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.2307/256404 · Cited by 4,519
SCHNEIDER, B. (1987) · Personnel Psychology · doi:10.1111/j.1744-6570.1987.tb00609.x · Cited by 4,473
WHY COMPANIES GO GREEN: A MODEL OF ECOLOGICAL RESPONSIVENESS.
Bansal, P., & Roth, K. (2000) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.2307/1556363 · Cited by 4,020
Cited by
Digitalisation as a Catalyst for Supplier Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Asokan, D. R., Smith, C. M., & Huq, F. A. (2026) · International Journal of Operations & Production Management · doi:10.1108/ijopm-09-2024-0851 · Cited by 4
Metadata
- Authors
- George, G., Haas, M. R., McGahan, A. M., Schillebeeckx, S. J. D., & Tracey, P.
- Venue
- Journal of Management
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2021-04-15
- Volume
- 49
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1841-1869
- ISSN
- 0149-2063 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-1211
- OpenAlex
- W3153943933
- Cited by
- 285
- References
- 125
- FWCI
- 33.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Purpose in the For-Profit Firm: A Review and Framework for Management Research. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/01492063211006450
- The paper
- George, G., Haas, M. R., McGahan, A. M., Schillebeeckx, S. J. D., & Tracey, P. (2023). Purpose in the For-Profit Firm: A Review and Framework for Management Research. Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063211006450
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
