The Debate Surrounding the Company Purpose in the Post-Pandemic Age

The recent COVID-19 pandemic crisis produced an extensive array of creative responses to confront its adverse results. Many companies worldwide were required to adopt innovative thinking by altering their business activities and revising their entire supply chain by attracting different types of resources delivered by various stakeholders. This Article is devoted to exploring the implications of this fundamental change on central theoretical assumptions of corporate governance. I articulate a new stakeholders-resources-based theory that explores governance norms as part of the firm’s quest for inputs required to generate competitive advantage. I apply this analytical framework within the debate on corporate purpose and argue that companies have to consider the interests of diverse constituencies, as long as it affects the company’s ability to produce value as an independent and separate legal entity. Moreover, I advocate a novel contingent interpretation for formulating a purpose that acknowledges the dynamic nature of business needs. It incorporates the life-cycle and the industry patterns to form an instructive tradeoff between efficiency, fairness, moral, and public policy considerations to understanding company’s own purpose. As a result, our reformulation of the company purpose debate brings closer the company’s business challenges and the law that governs its multi-level interactions with various constituencies for addressing different challenges effectively.