Social Issues and Management: Our Lost Cause Found

Abstract
The Academy of Management (AOM) was founded to help meet society’s social and economic objectives and in so doing, serve the public interest. However, scholarship in our field has pursued society’s economic objectives much more than it has its social ones. Surveying the supply and demand for all of the empirical research published by the AOM between 1958 and 2000 and all of the research published between 1972 and 2001 that attempts to link a firm’s social and economic performance, we provide evidence for this claim. We then propose reasons for why this research imbalance exists and conclude by foreshadowing a research agenda that honors our field’s historic social values.