Aligning Value Creation and Allocation Through Asymmetries Reduction: B Corps in the Spotlight

By following the classic logic of value creation, firms capture most of the value created with their stakeholders (economic, societal, and environmental) and generate asymmetries toward them. The new stakeholder theory emphasizes value creation at the firm-stakeholder level and challenges this perspective by considering value creation and value allocation as closely interrelated. However, little is known about how firms may concretely improve the alignment of value creation and allocation in stakeholder systems. We address this research gap by conducting multiple case study research involving four firms and their key stakeholders. The chosen context of analysis lies in B Corps, i.e., firms holding the B Corp certification, which prove to meet high standards of social and environmental performance. Our findings contribute to new stakeholder theory by empirically illustrating how the value created through stakeholder collaboration is distributed among stakeholders through mechanisms that better align value creation and allocation. We advance a model that integrates institutionalized asymmetries and the mechanisms to reduce them and frames them into time and space dimensions.