It is only in recent years that the idea of corporate purpose has reemerged. The default purpose of organizations was in general grounded in the shareholder primacy that “corporations exist principally to serve shareholders” (Business Roundtable, 2019 Ostermaier and van Aaken 2020) and the sole “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970, p. 32). However, at this time, the interest in purpose failed to take on a central role in management. In their view, the traditional focus in commercial organizations on maximizing profit is too narrow and neglects a company’s broader role in its social environment (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1994). About three decades ago, Bartlett and Ghoshal ( 1994, p. 80) called for a change in the role of top management “from setting strategy to defining purpose”. The idea of purpose has been around management for quite some time (Barnard 1938 Selznick 1957 Singleton 2014). By enhancing construct clarity, the paper paves the avenue for further research on corporate purpose and the further development of the field. In addition, this paper underpins the definition with seven core characteristics of corporate purpose, delineates scope conditions and elaborates on the relationship of corporate purpose with related concepts including mission, vision, corporate social responsibility and sustainability. To this end, it reviews and synthesizes the literature on corporate purpose and proposes a definition that integrates different approaches. Given that a field’s development is shaped by the clarity of its constructs, this paper strives to evolve the construct of corporate purpose from a ‘tower of babel’ phenomenon towards construct clarity. Despite this, the construct of corporate purpose is still under-conceptualized and suffers from multiple – and partly divergent – understandings. In recent years, interest in corporate purpose has gained momentum among both practitioners and academic researchers.
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