The Purpose of Business Organizations: An Academic-Practitioner Conversation and Emergent Framework

This paper presents an edited practitioner–academic conversation among eight leading scholars and practitioners on the enduring question of business purpose. Drawing on two Academy of Management symposia, the conversation reveals two distinct but potentially complementary views. One emphasizes the firm's purpose as the efficient provision of goods and services and clearer boundaries between business and other societal institutions. The other understands purpose more broadly in terms of stakeholder value creation, human flourishing, and societal well-being. To interpret these positions, we bring the conversation into dialogue with Aristotelian practical rationality, Weberian rationalization, and contemporary scholarship on organizational purpose. We develop a framework distinguishing accounts in which stakeholder goods are subordinated to profit through an end–means logic from those in which profit and intrinsic values are integrated through a part–whole understanding of the firm's societal role. The framework provides a basis for examining how organizational purpose is justified and enacted in practice.