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This symposium will highlight advances in mainstream management theory coming from scholarship on business approaches to environmental and sustainability issues. We seek to offer a different twist on the overall conference theme – “doing well by doing good” – by moving beyond a concern with the financial and other outcomes associated with social performance. Instead, we will discuss how detailed attention to the actions of firms on environmental and sustainability issues can clarify and extend existing theories of organization, institutional formation and function, and strategic interaction.

The symposium will consist of four brief and provocative presentations, each of which reviews a research area in the business and environment/sustainability literature and discusses how it extends mainstream theory. Our discussant, Max Bazerman, will provide brief comments and then facilitate an interactive discussion among members of the symposium panel and the audience. The overall goals of the symposium are to demonstrate the promise of studying firms’ efforts to “do good” for extending theory of organizations and strategy, and to stimulate the audience to think of further opportunities to pursue such work.