【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 up an executive’s confusion about where things stand, frame strategic choices about where to go, aid in setting benchmarks and goals, and perhaps speed movement forward. Stages of Development What does it mean that a pany is at a “stage” of corporate citizenship? The general idea—found in the study of children, groups, and systems of all types, including business organizations—is that there are distinct patterns of activity at different points of development. Typically, these activities bee more plex and sophisticated as development progresses and therefore capacities to respond to environmental challenges increase in kind. Piaget’s developmental theory, for example, has children progress through stages that entail more plex thinking and finer judgments about how to negotiate the social world outside of themselves. Similarly, groups mature along a developmental path as they confront emotional and task challenges that require more socially sensitive interaction and sophisticated problem solving. Greiner, in his groundbreaking study of organizational growth, found that panies also develop more plex ways of doing things at different stages of growth. They must, over time, find more direction after their creative startup phase, develop an infrastructure and systems to take on more responsibilities, and then “work through” the challenges of overcontrol and redtape through coordination and later collaboration across work units and levels. Development of Citizenship There are a number of models of “stages” of corporate citizenship. On a macro scale, for example, scholars have tracked changing conceptions of the role of business in society as advanced by business leaders, governments, academics, and multisector associations. They document how increasingly elaborate and inclusive definitions of 6 social responsibility, environmental protection, and corporate ethics and governance have developed over recent decades that enlarge the role of business in society. Others have looked into the spread of these ideas into industry and society in the form of social and professional movements. At the level of the firm, Post and Altman have shown how environmental policies progressively broaden and deepen as panies encounter more demanding expectations and build their capability to meet them. In turn, Zadek’s case study of Nike’s response to challenges in its supply chain highlights stages in the development of attitudes about social responsibilities in panies and in corporate responsiveness to social issues. Both of these studies emphasize the role of organizational learning as conceptions of pany responsibilities bee more plex at successive stages of development, action requirements are more demanding, and the organizational structures, processes, and systems used to manage citizenship are more elaborate and prehensive. What such firmlevel frameworks have not fully addressed are the generative logic and mechanisms that drive the development of citizenship within organizations. Here we consider the development of citizenship as a stagebystage process where a bination of internal capabilities applied to environmental challenges propels development forward in a more or less “normal” or normative logic. Greiner’s model of organizational growth illustrates this normative trajectory. In his terms, the development of an organization is punctuated by a series of predictable crises that trigger responses that move the organization forward. What are the triggering mechanisms? They are tensions between current practices and the problems they produce that demand a new response from a firm. For instance, creativity, the entrepreneurial fire in panies in their first stage, also generates confusion and a loss of focus that can stall growth. This poses a “crisis of leadership” that is resolved—and a stage of orderly growth results—once the firm gains direction, often under new leadership and with more formal structur