J. Gualandris, O. Branzei, S. Lazzarini, M. Wilhelm, K. Dooley, M. Linnenluecke, M. Barnett, R. Hamann & C-M Chen. Unchaining supply chains: Enabling transformative leaps toward regenerative socio-ecological systems. Guest editors of special issue at Journal of Supply Chain Management

The need to go beyond a ‘no harm’ logic and move towards rethinking supply chains so that they can respectfully and harmoniously integrate with nature is more salient than ever given accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. We want to take stock and reflect on the advancements made to enhance our understanding of how supply chains can go beyond minimizing harm to operate in harmony with nature by becoming regenerative. We still know little about the principles, processes, and outcomes that characterize regenerative supply chains. Yet humanity has an urgent need to advance theoretical insights and practical guidance in this direction. 

N. Gardberg, M. Barnett & E. Colleoni. “Unbelievable! How fake news affects the relationship between business and society.” Guest editors of special issue at Business & Society 

No lie, it's going to be a great special issue!

M. Barnett, B. Gilbert, C. Post & J. Robinson. 2024. Strengthening our cities: Exploring the intersection of ethics, diversity and inclusion, and social innovation in revitalizing urban environments.” Journal of Business Ethics (forth). 

This is the editorial essay for a great special issue that explains that, although it is not easy, there are some ways to strengthen our cities, which are increasingly home to most of the world's population.

J. Gualandris, O. Branzei, S. Lazzarini, M. Wilhelm, K. Dooley, M. Linnenlucke, M. Barnett, R. Hamann & C-M Chen. 2024. Unchaining supply chains: Transformative leaps toward regenerating social-ecological systems. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 60: 53-67. 

The worsening climate, biodiversity, and inequity crises have existential implications. To help resolve these crises, supply chains must move beyond a minimal harm approach. This essay deepens the understanding of regenerative supply chains, inviting supply chain scholars and practitioners to rally around timely questions and codevelop new answers. 

M. L. Barnett. 2023. Corporate social responsibility. In G. Goethals, T. Allison & G. Sorenson (eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies. Sage.

I offer an extended definition of CSR, focused on leadership aspects.

Busch, T., Barnett, M.L., Burritt, R.L., Cashore, B.W., Freeman, R.E., Henriques, I., Husted, B.W., Panwar, R., Pinske, J., Schaltegger, S., & York. J. 2023. Moving beyond "the" business case: How to make corporate sustainability work. Business Strategy and the Environment, 1-12: https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.3514 (online first)

If the business case is a mess, and government regulation presents its own problems, where do we go from here? A small army of social and environmental scholars debated next steps and came up with this paper.

M. Barnett, V. Dimitrov & F. Gao. 2022. The nail that sticks out: Corporate social responsibility and shareholder proposals. Review of Accounting Studies. (online first)

We investigate whether shareholders consider CSR performance when submitting proxy proposals. We find that shareholders are more likely to propose governance changes when a firm has more CSR strengths and more CSR concerns. The results hold across popular proposal types, different sponsors, and different categories of CSR. We find similar results for social proposals. Although CSR strengths and concerns are not associated with the percentage of votes received in favor of a proposal, the higher likelihood of receiving shareholder proposals translates into a higher likelihood that at least one shareholder proposal receives majority support at the meeting. Our results suggest managers may avoid distinctively strong (and weak) CSR performance to reduce the costs of standing out.

S. Buchanan & M. L. Barnett. 2022. Inside the velvet glove: Sustaining private regulatory institutions through hollowing and fortifying. Organization Science, 33(6): 2159-2186.

Industry self-regulation is inherently unstable -- a bunch of rival firms agreeing to stricter standards for sake of building and protecting their reputations & forestalling even stronger regulation. How are these institutions sustained? We develop a dynamic process model, through an in-depth study of the Towards Sustainable Mining program in the Canadian mining industry.   

M. L. Barnett. 2022. Questions and Unanswers About Social Innovation. Rutgers Business Review, 7(2): 95-101.

The Questions and Unanswers About Social Innovation seminar series brings

together scholars from around the world to debate important issues about

social innovation. This special issue codifies and extends several debates from

the inaugural series. Consistent with the seminar format, each paper in this

special issue addresses a question of importance to social innovation, presents

opposing answers, then identifies contingencies that cause variation in the

focal relationship, and closes with insights on how to integrate these seemingly

divergent perspectives in order to move the field forward by asking better

research questions.

M. L. Barnett, I. Henriques & B. Husted. 2022. Salvaging corporate sustainability: Going beyond the business case. Edward Elgar.

In this book, we three scholars, spread across three countries, integrate our three decades of work to develop a three-dimensional view of sustainability that moves beyond "business & society", toward business, government, & society. 

M. L. Barnett, I. Henriques & B. Husted. 2021. “Sustainability strategies”. In I. Duhaime, M. Hitt & M. Lyles (eds.) Strategic Management: State of the Field and its Future, Oxford University Press: pages 647-662.

This is a great edited book, featuring chapters from leading strategy scholars, focused on ways to move the field forward, and we're proud to be a part of it. 

M. L. Barnett, B. Cashore, I. Henriques, B. Husted, R. Panwar & J. Pinkse. 2021. Reorient the business case for corporate sustainability.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 19(3): 34-39.

Win-win solutions aren't getting us to sustainability. Here, we point out how win-win framing produces three troublesome biases -- easy wins, techno-centrism, and consumerism -- and we suggest three steps -- account for impact, collaborate, and design for degrowth -- to move forward. 

M. L. Barnett, I. Henriques & B. Husted. 2021. Family matters? The effects of size and proximity in the digital age. Academy of Management Perspectives, 35: 556-561.

This is our counterpoint to a "point" about the relevance of size and proximity in understanding stakeholder influence in the digital age, relative to our 2020 AMP on the rise & stall of stakeholder influence. It suggests a few new research directions, but overall, we think that both size and proximity fit within our published model.

M. L. Barnett, I. Henriques & B. Husted. 2020. Beyond good intentions: Designing CSR initiatives for greater social impact. Journal of Management, 46(6): 973-964.

Are CSR initiatives providing the societal good that they promise? We review 6,254 articles addressing CSR performance published in the past 50 years. None demonstrated that CSR initiatives achieved their ultimate intended impact. To help firms do better at doing better, scholars need to focus on impact evaluation.

M. L. Barnett. 2020. Helping business help society: Overcoming barriers to corporate social innovation. Rutgers Business Review, 5(2): 137-144

This is the introduction to a special issue I guest edited, containing ten great articles (freely available at rbr.business.rutgers.edu) on various aspects of corporate social innovation. I review and synthesize them, and I chart a path forward for CSI by identifying its five component parts: invention, innovation, intrapreneurship, integration, and impact. 

M. L. Barnett, I. Henriques & B. Husted. 2020. The rise and stall of stakeholder influence: How the digital age limits social control. Academy of Management Perspectives, 34(1): 48-64.

The digital age was supposed to democratize corporate control. It didn't. We explain why stakeholders have not increased their influence over firm behavior in the internet age, despite (and because of) the ease of sharing information.

M. L. Barnett. 2019. The business case for corporate social responsibility: A critique and an indirect path forward. Business & Society, 58(1): 167-190.

For decades, across thousands of studies, we've shown that it pays to be good. Right? Wrong. We've shown that it pays to not piss off those who have power over you. We haven't shown that it pays to help the powerless & needy of society. We've been doing it wrong. This is a call to do it right, and to see if it really does pay to be good.

M. L. Barnett. 2018. Limits to stakeholder influence: Why the business case won’t save the world. Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham, UK. (paperback release: June 2020)

This book covers 20 years of my work on the business case for corporate social responsibility. I trace the mechanisms and the boundaries of what turns good into gold, and bad into bubkis, and make the case that stakeholders aren't well suited to the role they've been delegated. 

M. L. Barnett, J. Hartmann & R. M. Salomon. 2018. Have you been served? Extending the relationship between corporate social responsibility and lawsuits. Academy of Management Discoveries, 4(2): 109-126. 

CSR has been shown to buffer firms from harm. But wouldn't it be nice if it also prevented harm? Here, we find that CSR buffers firms from lawsuits. And we start off with several lawyer jokes. Oh, and the publisher made a cartoon of it as well!

M. L. Barnett, I. Henriques & B. Husted. 2018. Governing the void between stakeholder management and sustainability. Advances in Strategic Management, 38: 121-143.

Managing for stakeholders won't get us to a sustainable world. We need to combine government regulation with stakeholder pressure to drive firms to address the wicked problems of sustainability. Here, we push the stakeholder literature beyond its libertarian underpinnings, bringing government back in.

M. L. Barnett & S. Leih. 2018. Sorry to (not) burst your bubble: The influence of reputation rankings on perceptions of firms. Business & Society, 57(5): 962-978.

Reputations are powerful, but what changes them? Here, we conduct an experiment to see how media rankings shape perceptions of firms. We conclude that reputations aren't as fragile as often described. 

I. Palomaries-Aguirre, M. L. Barnett, F. Layrisse & B. Husted. 2018. Built to scale? How sustainable business models can better serve the base of the pyramid. Journal of Cleaner Production, 172: 4506-13.

Scaling sustainable business models at the base of the pyramid has proven difficult. We study affordable housing for the poorest in Mexico and find that community engagement and government collaboration are critical factors that had not been well highlighted in the literature. We suggest revising the SCALERS model to become RESCALE (replication, earnings generation, staffing, communication, alliance building, lobbying, and engagement with the community). 

M. L. Barnett. 2018. Beyond the membership decision: How do trade associations manage firm involvement? Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(1): 10-12.

Though the literature is surprisingly limited, work on trade associations focuses on membership decisions. Yet, that's just the start. What happens after? Why are some trade associations more "successful" than others? I explore three drivers not of membership but of participation: economic self-interest, sociological identity, and meta-organizational management. 

M. L. Barnett. 2018. Influence stakeholders, influence the world. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 56: 247–258.

If social movements want to get firms to behave differently, they should target their stakeholders and convince them that these firms should behave differently. Here's why, and a bit of how.

M. L. Barnett. 2016. Mind: the gap – To advance CSR research, think about stakeholder cognition. Annals in Social Responsibility, 2(1): 4-17.

I've got a bit of a theme going here . . . stakeholders drive the business case. Thus, we need a better understanding of stakeholder cognition. How and when will they decide to punish and reward firms? 

M. L. Barnett. 2016. Strategist, organize thyself. Strategic Organization, 14(2): 146-155.

As you can see from this list of publications, I've put a lot of time and energy into advancing management thought. But I'm nothing special -- thousands like me do the same. And what's the end result? Well, maybe not as much as we would like. Here, I offer some structured ideas on how to do better.

M. L. Barnett. 2016. Reputational spillovers. In C. Carroll (ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Corporate Reputation. SAGE Publications, Inc.: p. 682-684. ISBN: 9781483376516

The very definition of reputational spillovers.

M. L. Barnett. 2016. Reputation risk. In C. Carroll (ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Corporate Reputation. SAGE Publications, Inc.: p. 669-670. ISBN: 9781483376516

The very definition of reputation risk.

M. L. Barnett & T. Pollock (eds). 2015. Corporate Reputation: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management. (4 volumes) Routledge.

For only $1,300 (a bargain at twice the price!), you can have our curated set of 70 core articles on corporate reputation. If you win the lottery, buy it here: https://www.routledge.com/Corporate-Reputation/Barnett-Pollock/p/book/9780415740661

It's actually a nice set of articles, and we wrote a solid introduction -- take a look.

M. L. Barnett, N. Darnall & B. Husted. 2015. Sustainability strategy in constrained economic times. Long Range Planning, 48(2): 63-68.

This is the introduction to a great special issue that we put together to better understand what happens to sustainability programs during economic downturns. We found that sustainability can take different forms, but firms don't end these programs or even substantively decrease them. Which is nice!

M. L. Barnett. 2015. Strategic learning. In D. Teece and M. Augier (eds.), Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan (online).

Be strategic and learn the definition of strategic learning right here -- can't get more meta than that!

M. L. Barnett. 2014. Why stakeholders ignore firm misconduct: A cognitive view. Journal of Management, 40(3): 676–702.

In the business case, stakeholders have been delegated the roles of accountant, policeman, juror, and judge over corporate behaviors. And we stink at it. This article explains how this creates a lot of leeway for firms to get away with bad acts. 

M. L. Barnett. 2013. One voice, but whose voice? Exploring what drives trade association activity. Business & Society, 52(2): 213-244.

Trade associations are intended to pursue the shared interests of their member firms. So do they? In this study, I find that they tend to increase spending when the profitability of the largest firms declines, but not necessarily when the profitability of the overall industry is in decline. This suggests that large firms drive trade association agendas and may be able to use trade associations to extend their advantages.

M. L. Barnett & T. Pollock (eds). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation.  Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

Tim and I assembled a great team of scholars, brought them all out to Oxford to twist their arms to write great, well-structured, consistent chapters, and the results are outlined in this opening chapter: a solid accounting of the state of the field on corporate reputation research. Go buy the full book -- you'll be glad you did.

M. L. Barnett & R. M. Salomon. 2012. Does it pay to be really good? Addressing the shape of the relationship between social and financial performance. Strategic Management Journal, 33: 1304-1320.

Spoiler alert: the shape of the relationship is curvilinear! It pays to be good, and it also pays to be bad. It doesn't pay to be a sorta' nice guy; you just get stuck in the middle. If you're a firm looking to profit from CSR, then you're likely to lose money at it until you establish a reputation for it. Go big or go home -- don't do half measures here. 

M. L. Barnett & S. Lee. 2012. Business as usual? An exploration of the determinants of success in the multinational transfer of corporate responsibility initiatives. Business & Politics, 14(3): 1-27.

Multinationals may seek to transfer CSR practices across countries. Is CSR transfer similar to the transfer of other operational practices across international subsidiaries? Yes and no. Read all about here. 

M. L. Barnett, A. Hoepner, S. Lux & I. Timofeeva. 2012. Managing reputation through collusion. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, SIM Division.

This is a neat paper that, unfortunately, I could never successfully pull together as a full journal publication across a rotating range of co-authors over many institutions and career stages. Anyway, the basic idea: seems that firms can exert some control over their AMAC ratings, which we call reputation collusion.

M. L. Barnett & A. A. King.  2008. Good fences make good neighbors: A longitudinal analysis of an industry self-regulatory institution. Academy of Management Journal, 51(6): 1150-1170.

This is my central dissertation paper. I lived in a world filled with news of chemical industry disasters for many years in order to gather and process this data. Extending the idea of a commons problem to industry reputations and showing how industry self-regulation can resolve these commons problems by building "mental fences" is the key contribution. Even has a poem in it! AMJ recognized it as the best paper of 2008.

W. H. Starbuck, M. L. Barnett & P. Baumard. 2008. Payoffs and pitfalls of strategic learning. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 66(1): 7-21.

Strategic learning sounds snazzy, and it can be. But it also has serious downsides, and can be harmful as often as it is helpful. 

M. L. Barnett. 2008. An attention-based view of real options reasoning. Academy of Management Review, 33(3): 606-628.

A mere decade passed after coming up with this idea, until its publication. I was a second year doctoral student when I first drafted it. I had earned tenure and associate professor status by the time it was in print. Overnight sensation ;) A cool paper, though. It gives a realistic assessment of the unrealistic expectations of applying real options tools to strategic management. 

M. L. Barnett & A. J. Hoffman. 2008. Beyond corporate reputation: Managing reputational interdependence. Corporate Reputation Review, 11(1): 1-9.

The company you keep affects the company you keep. Probably my favorite opening line! Andy and I guest edited this special issue to bring attention to the need for managing reputations at the level of industries. Figure 1 does a great job of showing how reputations actually work, when we know more about an industry than we do about the specifics of any given firm within it. And we have some great scholars in this issue, at the start of their careers. 

M. L. Barnett & R. L. M. Dunbar. 2008. Making sense of real options reasoning: An engine of choice that backfires?  In G. Hodgkinson & W. Starbuck (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Decision Making.  Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 383-398.

Roger and I take a critical view of real options reasoning, and quickly devolve into a weird example about a doll named Amiable Amber. See for yourself . . . 

M. L. Barnett. 2007. Stakeholder influence capacity and the variability of financial returns to corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review, 32(3): 794-816.

My most cited paper. And the one that I had the easiest time publishing, too. Basically, I took ideas about absorptive capacity that I connected with during doctoral seminars at NYU and Columbia, and then applied that notion of path dependence to stakeholder relationships. A lot of other cool stuff in here about the mechanisms of the business case for CSR. This logic underpins the curvilinear relationship found in the 2012 SMJ. 

M. L. Barnett. 2007. (Un)Learning and (mis)education through the eyes of Bill Starbuck: An interview with Pandora’s playmate.  Academy of Management Learning & Education, 6(1): 114-127

Learn straight from the source -- Bill Starbuck spills the beans to me about learning and education, warts and all.

M. L. Barnett. 2007. Tarred and untarred by the same brush: Exploring interdependence in the volatility of stock returns. Corporate Reputation Review, 10(1): 3-21.

Based on my dissertation data, I explore volatility across the chemical industry before and after Bhopal and before and after Responsible Care's implementation. Consistent with the AMJ 2008 paper, I find that the major shock of Bhopal caused an increase in volatility across industry, and after the implementation of the industry self-regulatory program, this volatility declined. 

M. L. Barnett & G. Cahill. 2007. Measure less, succeed more: A Zen approach to organisational balance and effectiveness. Philosophy of Management, 6(1): 147-162.

Though we had a helluva time finding a home for it, I really like this paper, mostly because it's completely different from everything else I've written. I teamed up with Gloria, who was the director of the Office of Community Service at NYU, to sort out how to use Zen principles to understand what things firms should measure, and what things they should just deal with "in the moment". There's even a table at the end with management applications of Zen sayings.

M. L. Barnett. 2006. Finding a working balance between competitive and communal strategy. Journal of Management Studies, 43(8): 1753-1773.

Theory paper from my dissertation. Also proud of this opening line: Rivals are also roommates. Here, I develop the concept of communal strategy (hasn't caught on like I think it should!), and explain how firms use it relative to competitive strategy to pursue competitive advantage. 

M. L. Barnett & R. M. Salomon. 2006. Beyond dichotomy: The curvilinear relationship between social responsibility and financial performance. Strategic Management Journal, 27(11): 1101-1122.

Rob and I set out to show that socially responsible investing is a bad way to try to earn money. We wound up being both right and wrong, as the data showed a curvilinear relationship. This paper won the IABS best paper award and serves as fundamental support for SRI nowadays.

M. L. Barnett, J. M. Jermier & B. A. Lafferty. 2006. Corporate reputation: The definitional landscape.  Corporate Reputation Review, 9(1): 26-38.

Can't underestimate the value of good timing! This is my third most-cited article, and perhaps the most straight-forward, published in one of the least visible journals. We simply build a definition of corporate reputation. As this field has taken off, it's become a core cite. Thanks!

M. L. Barnett. 2006. Waves of collectivizing: A dynamic model of competition and cooperation over the life of an industry. Corporate Reputation Review, 8(4): 272-292.

In this paper, I offer a different take on the broader conceptual idea of balancing competition and cooperation that I published in Journal of Management Studies.

M. L. Barnett. 2006. Review of The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability by M. Iansiti & R. Levien. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(2): 88-90.

This marked the end of my book review phase. In the book, the authors make the case that monopoly power can be a good thing. In my review, I take issue with the sales pitch for benevolent dictatorships.  

M. L. Barnett & A. A. King. 2006. Good fences make good neighbors: An institutional explanation of industry self-regulation. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, OMT: M1-M6.

Early version of the full paper published in AMJ in 2008. If you're looking for a shortened version, this will work; else, wise just to read the 2008 version.

M. L. Barnett & B. A. Hudson. 2006. Big & bad? A sociological perspective on the Icarus Paradox.  In B. Husted & J. Logsdon (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the International Association for Business & Society, pp. 239-241.

One of many ideas that I think have merit, but just never spun up into a successful paper. The Icarus Paradox fascinates me, and I sought to explain stakeholder management problems by thinking about the reverse -- the Helios Paradox, as I framed it. Here, the idea is not just that Icarus got cocky, but that the sun also got pissed off at Icarus and turned up the heat. I think this can help explain why dominant firms struggle. 

M. L. Barnett. 2005. Paying attention to real options. R&D Management, 35(1): 61-72.

This article developed out of one of the many revisions that eventually turned into the 2008 AMR on real options. It makes some key points about process and implications of using real options reasoning to manage a firm's portfolio of projects.

M. L. Barnett. 2005. Giving credits where credit’s not due? Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(2): 221-228.

I suspect I may have taken the assignment that Walt Nord gave me just a little too seriously. This review was one of ten or so that Walt commissioned, and all the others were one or two pages long. On the other hand, well, I kind of systematically dismantled the book's logic. The weird part: I received fawning emails from senior scholars around the country thereafter. It wasn't my original intent to do so -- in fact, I was trying to figure out after the first read what I was going to say to criticize the general logical idea that underpins it -- but some vocal folks were quite happy to see me thoroughly criticize the book in very pointed ways. 

M. L. Barnett. 2005. Review of The SMS Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Capabilities: Emergence, Development, and Change, C. Helfat (ed.). Academy of Management Review, 30(1): 203-207.

I eventually stopped doing book reviews because, as a junior professor, I kept running into the senior folks after I wrote critical points about their work. In this one, I work through the logic of releasing a $100 book that is a reprint of an SMJ special issue. 

M. L. Barnett. 2005. Stakeholder influence capacity and the variability of financial returns to corporate social responsibility. In L. Ryan and J. Logsdon (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the International Association for Business & Society Proceedings, pp. 287-292.

Early and abbreviated version of my 2007 Academy of Management Review. 

M. L. Barnett. 2004. Are globalization and sustainability compatible? A review of the debate between the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the International Forum on Globalization. Organization & Environment, 17(4): 523-532.

For this review, I read two books, and I even attended a debate between the authors. I prefer that format to a review of a single book -- the comparisons across books are interesting to draw out. I aspire to Jim Walsh level of insights in book review essays. In this case, upon close read, it's pretty evident that the WBCSD is hyping an awful lot of handwaving. That was 2002. A couple decades later, I think we can conclude that I was correct. 

M. L. Barnett. 2004. Kicking the black box around: A review of “The Corporation.” Organizational Analysis, 12(4): 419-422.

I probably got up to a bit more mayhem than was generally advisable as an assistant professor. One of the things I did was hold a showing of "The Corporation", and then have a debate with some fairly conservative folks about its merits. They pretty much dismissed it as hyperbole. I disagreed. This is my side of that debate with our executive in residence at the time. BTW, the sequel is out now -- and the problems are still very much there and then some.

M. L. Barnett. 2004. How much does industry strategy matter? Organizational field dynamics and cooperation among rivals.  Academy of Management Best Paper Proceeding, OMT: B1-B6.

This is a brief and early version of what turned into my 2006 publication in Journal of Management Studies. 

M. L. Barnett, J. M. Jermier & B. A. Lafferty. 2004. Theorizing corporate reputation. Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Corporate Reputation, Image, Identity and Competitiveness (CD).

A brief and early version of what turned into our 2006 publication in Corporate Reputation Review. 

M. L. Barnett. 2004. Cooperation among rivals in pursuit of institutional change: Three essays on the antecedents, process, and outcome. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, NYU/Stern.

The summation of 6 (and a half) years of PhD work. 

M. L. Barnett, W. H. Starbuck, & P. N. Pant. 2003. Which dreams come true? Endogeneity, industry structure, and forecasting accuracy. Industrial and Corporate Change, 12(4): 653-672.

This paper makes a neat point, and does it in a neat way. In his work, Bill has pointed out many ways in which managers can't forecast, and often don't even know what's going on right now. But tech changes had been moving along at a predictable pace for decades. We wrote this article to make sense of that conundrum. And we did it by first conducting a case study, and then digging into a quantitative analysis of a large longitudinal data set. Anyway, turns out that if you want to make an accurate predication, well it helps if you can control the outcomes -- something, say, bookies have known for a long time.

M. L. Barnett. 2003. Falling off the fence? A realistic appraisal of a real options approach to corporate strategy. Journal of Management Inquiry, 12(2): 185-196.

As noted a long scroll above, my 2008 publication on real options reasoning took a decade and many revisions to see the published light of day. Along the way, the paper took so many twists and turns that two other journal publications and a book chapter sprung out of the effort. Here's one of them. 

M. L. Barnett & R. M. Salomon. 2003. Throwing a curve at SRI research: A new pitch at an old debate. Organization & Environment, 16(3): 381-389.

This is a discussion based on some of the work that went into the 2006 Strategic Management Journal publication.

M. L. Barnett & R. M. Salomon. 2003. Opening the screen door toward a middle ground on socially responsible investing. The Corporate Citizen, 3(2): 16-20.

A practitioner angle on the work that went into the 2006 Strategic Management Journal publication.

M. L. Barnett. 2002. From me to we . . . and back again: Returning to business as usual. Journal of Management Inquiry, 11(3): 249-252.

I was in Manhattan on Sep. 11, 2001. Fortunately, I was on 72nd Street, which is miles away from Ground Zero. I volunteered at the site shortly after, and helped with NYU's efforts as well, and even staffed an economic recovery helpline in the months thereafter. But, there wasn't much I could do to help out those directly in harm's way. As an academic, I could reflect though, and write it up. And so that's what I did. Bill Starbuck edited a collection of these personal essays for a special issue that was published a year later. Mine predicts that al the national unity of 9/11 would be short-lived. Unfortunately, my predication was accurate.  

M. L. Barnett & G. Cahill. 2002.  A Zen approach to volunteer management. Journal of Volunteer Administration, 20(3): 41-47.

This a shorter, practitioner version of the Philosophy of Management paper that we published in 2007.

A. King, M. Lenox & M L. Barnett. 2002. Strategic responses to the reputation commons problem. In A. Hoffman and M. Ventresca (eds.), Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment: Institutional and Strategic Perspectives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 393-406.

I learned a lot when I got the opportunity to work with Andy and Mike, as they grappled with how to approach industry self-regulation and its effects on pollution reduction. We loudly argued through many different framings, outlining them on the white board in Mike's office at NYU. I brought a reputation management perspective to the discussion, and this is the first crack at the ideas that underpinned my thesis and many of my later individual and joint publications. The book that this chapter is in is also a great read -- the other Andy and Marc Ventresca did a great job with editing it.

M. L. Barnett & R. M. Salomon. 2002. Unpacking social responsibility: The curvilinear relationship between social and financial performance. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, SIM: B1- 6.

Early and shortened version of the 2006 Strategic Management Journal publication. 

M. L. Barnett & R. M. Salomon. 2001. Don’t get stuck in the middle: A curvilinear bridge spanning the great SRI divide. In C. P. Dunn & D. Windsor (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the International Association for Business & Society Proceedings: 65-69.

Early and shortened version of the 2006 Strategic Management Journal publication. 

C. J. Fombrun, N. A. Gardberg & M. L. Barnett. 2000. Opportunity platforms and safety nets: Corporate citizenship and reputational risk. Business and Society Review, 105(1): 85-106.

Timing trumps placement! For all those folks who refuse to publish anything in a non-A journal, let me clarify that this is my second most-cited article, and the journal wasn't even indexed when we published it. It's a foundational piece for explaining why it pays to be good. I use the figures in it all the time in explaining to students how CSR works. 

M. L. Barnett, M. E. Boyle & N. A. Gardberg. 2000. Towards one vision, one voice: A review essay of the 3rd International Conference on Corporate Reputation, Image and Competitiveness. Corporate Reputation Review, 3(2): 101-111.

My very first publication! I have a framed picture hanging in my office that declares the date when I "turned pro" because the publisher gave me a one pound sterling postage stamp as payment for the copyright. It's an overview of a conference in Puerto Rico that I helped organize. It was very seat of the pants, and my introduction to the price gouging of hotel catering (still not over it!) These conferences eventually took on a life of their own. The Reputation Institute became a formal consultancy company and now runs these events like the Oscars.