The escalation of prosocial commitment: How the B corporation movement catalyzes social impact

Organizations have embraced sustainability certifications as a way of demonstrating their prosocial commitments. These certifications are often rigorous and resource-intensive, and yet some certified organizations increase their efforts beyond receiving the certification. To understand why, we revisit the literature on escalation of commitment to theorize the escalation of prosocial commitment. We test our framework by analyzing why B Corporations (B Corps)—businesses that have been certified for their prosocial commitments—would participate in an initiative that challenged them to improve their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices and whether their efforts have any effect. Our framework emphasizes three organization-level drivers of escalation of prosocial commitment: image and identity, internal and external context, and urgency to demonstrate impact. Our findings largely support these drivers. Furthermore, escalation of prosocial commitment leads to improvements in both DEI practices and sustainability practices more generally and has collective spillover benefits, including reduced certification attrition rates and a positive shift in the DEI profiles of new B Corps that certified for the first time after the conclusion of the initiative. We also find a surprising outcome—what we call a paradox of inclusivity: B Corps with less emphasis on DEI practices, despite being strong in other sustainability areas, were more likely to exit the B Corp movement after the initiative. Our research contributes to the escalation of commitment literature, reveals practice implications for certifying bodies and organizations seeking to foster social impact, and offers insights to policymakers about potential levers for remaking capitalism.