Corporate social performance and corporate reputation have been linked in numerous theoretical and methodological configurations. Corporate social performance is typically defined as a commercial organization’s arrangement of principles [Page 212]of social responsibility, its processes of social responsiveness, and its policies, programs, and observable outcomes as they apply to society. Research on the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate reputation tends to use a more restrictive view of corporate social performance as observable outcomes to society. And within this limited scope researchers have tended to find a positive relationship between corporate social performance and reputation in the United States.

Both corporate reputation and social performance are socially constructed, intangible constructs that vary over time and across institutional environments. Yet they share characteristics that link them theoretically ...