Revisiting Corporate Sustainability: Towards a Critically-Performative Research Agenda

Corporations have acknowledged the importance of being perceived as socially responsible. Their actions however frequently show a misalignment between image and actions, which calls for critical research on the substance of corporate sustainability. Scholars of the Critical Management Studies movement have engaged in disclosing the ‘dark side’ of corporate behavior. Yet, we argue this stream of research has focused on deconstructing, and remained at distance to reflexivity and reconstruction. We conceptualize a research framework of critically performative and reflexive practices of deconstruction, reconstruction and self-reflection to advance critical research on CS, addressing shortcomings of current CS research - being overly functionalistic and instrumental - and a CMS agenda, which is often disconnected from economic constraints.