The performance of business organizations is affected by their strategies and operations in market and non-market environments (Baron 2000). The increasing power of activist groups and the media in pluralist western societies can be expected to make organizations' non-market strategies even more important. One construct that might capture a major element of these non-market strategies is corporate social performance (CSP). CSP can be defined as 'a business organization's configuration of principles of social responsibility, processes of social responsiveness, and policies, programs, and observable outcomes as they relate to the firm's societal relationships' (Wood 1991a: 693).

The impression that 'in the aggregate, results are inconclusive' regarding any theoretical conclusions about the relationship between CSP and corporate financial performance (CFP) has persisted until today (Jones and Wicks 1999:212; cf. also Donaldson 1999; McWilliams and Siegel 2001; Roman et al. 1999). Ullmann (1985) and Wood and Jones (1995) argued that during the past three decades of empirical research on this relationship, researchers have engaged in a futile search for stable causal patterns. A number of narrative reviews and theories (for example, Aupperle et al. 1985; Griffin and Mahon 1997; Husted 2000; McWilliams and Siegel 2001; Pava and Krausz 1995; Ullmann 1985; Wartick and Cochran 1985; Wood 1991a, 1991b; Wood and Jones 1995) have proposed conceptual explanations for the existence (or lack thereof) of a causal relationship between CSP and CFP, but failed to provide clear answers. Previous reviews of this area have suggested that such factors as stakeholder mismatching (Wood and Jones 1995), the general neglect of contingency factors (for example, Ullmann 1985), and measurement errors (for example, Waddock and Graves 1997) may explain inconsistent findings. Other authors, failing to see important differences between theory and operational context, are even more pessimistic and call for a moratorium of CSP--CFP research (Margolis and Walsh 2001; Rowley and Berman 2000). Before we embark on a costly search for contingencies or abandon a line of inquiry altogether, a theoretically and empirically meaningful integration of this area might be useful. In this article, we argue that this line of inquiry contains a number of theoretical conclusions that have hitherto been overlooked or ignored by many organizational scholars.

This article presents a meta-analytic review of primary quantitative studies of the CSP--CFP relationship. Meta-analysis has proven to be a useful technique' in many substantive areas where multiple individual studies have yielded inconclusive or conflicting results (for example, Damanpour 1991; Datta et al. 1992; Gooding and Wagner 1985; Schwenk 1989; see also Hedges 1987; Hunt 1997; Rosenthal and DiMatteo 2001; and Schmidt 1992 for broader reviews of meta-analysis). By statistically aggregating results across individual, studies and correcting for statistical artefacts such as sampling error and measurement error, psychometric meta-analysis allows for much greater precision than other forms of research reviews. Ironically, those researchers that question the meaningfulness of the CSP--CFP research stream the most (Griffin and Mahon 1997; Margolis and Walsh 2001) have integrated the empirical evidence with the so-called 'vote-counting' technique, which, for a variety of reasons, has been shown to be invalid by many statistical experts (Hedges and Olkin 1980; Hunter and Schmidt 1990; Rosenthal 1995; Schmidt 1992). When, in 'vote counting', studies are simply coded as showing significantly positive, negative, or statistically non-significant results, conclusions are likely to be false (Hedges and Olkin 1980; Hunter and Schmidt 1990). In contrast, psychometric meta-analysis quantifies the impact of theoretical' and methodological deficiencies in a given line of inquiry and is, therefore, at present, the most sophisticated research-integration technique.

The specific objectives of this meta-analysis are to: (1) provide a statistical integration of the accumulated research on the relationship between CSP and CFP; (2) assess the relative predictive validity of instrumental stakeholder theory in the context of the CSP-CFP relationship; and (3) examine several moderators, such as operationalization of CSP and CFP (that is, measurement strategies) and timing of CSP and CFP measurement. In so doing, it builds on earlier research by: (a) including market (stock) return measures in addition to accounting returns; (b) including CSP measures other than social-responsibility audits performed by Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Co., Inc.; (c) responding to Waddock and Graves' (1997: 315) call for research on the temporal consistency of results, independent of the time lag chosen between CSP and CFP measures; and (d) integrating empirical results across diverse study contexts and enabling us to look for theoretical moderators and statistical artifacts that might explain the highly variable results across previous studies.

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