But it is one that offers real-world accountability and not just high-sounding aspiration. Marquis is the Samuel C. Johnson professor in sustainable global enterprise at Cornell University.

The B Corp movement isn’t new, but it is still relatively unknown. Give us its history.

It dates back to 2006 or so, with entrepreneurs who established the B Lab, which is the certifying organization for B Corporations. Their concern was that companies weren’t set up in a way that enabled them to have the social impact these entrepreneurs felt they should have. There were two dimensions to what they had in mind. The first was accountability, so they developed a rigorous process so companies could assess where they were in their evolution along these lines. To be certified, you have to qualify in 80 of 200 categories.

What was the second dimension?

The second was in the area of governance. The movement has pushed for laws that create a new kind of corporation, the benefit corp, to distinguish it from C Corps and S Corps and LLCs and the rest. The explicit purpose of a benefit corp, which is now a legal category in 36 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and some other countries, goes beyond making a profit. It might be to provide stakeholder employment, for example, or promote sustainability. And then there are accountability components, to measure its success in meeting these purposes — so transparency of purpose is part of it. In part, this movement has come about in an attempt to quantify whether specific companies are really having the impact on society that they talk about, a way to distinguish what they do from “greenwashing.”

How successful has the movement been?

The best-known B Corps are ones you might expect, like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s. So far, the biggest companies have not come on board, but some have: Danone’s $6 billion North American subsidiary is a B Corp. Danone’s products in the U.S. are branded as Dannon. There are now B corps in 150 industries and more than 70 countries, more than half of them headquartered outside the U.S. I think consumer awareness will increase as the B Corp logo appears more frequently on products, as they do on Dannon yogurt packages. This will drive brand awareness, which I think will increase significantly in the next five to 15 years, as more large companies get on board. There’s a demand for this, after all. Consumers want to buy from companies with a mission that goes beyond making a profit for shareholders. The problem has been that they can’t always identify these companies.

Your book was published exactly 50 years after Milton Friedman’s famous New York Times Magazine essay that argued that CEOs’ legal and ethical responsibility was to the company’s shareholders, not to some vague social purpose beyond making money for these shareholders. I’m assuming the date of publication was not a coincidence?

No, it wasn’t. This book is in part a response to that Friedmanite approach and a reflection of the changes in thinking about capitalism that have taken place since then. I’m thinking, for example, of the Business Roundtable statement of August 2019 that redefined the purpose of corporations to go beyond serving shareholders and to extend to all stakeholders. The World Economic Forum has moved in this direction, too. You can think of the B Corps movement as a way to achieve the goals set by the Business Roundtable and the World Economic Forum, to make these goals a reality.

But wasn’t Friedman misinterpreted? His concern, it seems to me, was just to remind people that CEOs who used their companies’ resources to pursue their own ideological interests were effectively doing so by using other people’s money — the shareholders’ money, of course — but if their activities drove prices up, they were using customers’ money, too. And CEOs have no legal or ethical authority to do that. They are, effectively, employees of the shareholders.

There’s something to that, but I don’t think Friedman anticipated the extent to which his thinking led to the short-term orientation of so many companies since his essay. “Agency theory” in economics has helped us understand the connection between this short-term orientation and the stock-option plans that tied executive compensation to short-term gains — and led to such income disparity we’re experiencing today.

For decades now, the concern of the kind of companies you’re talking about has been largely environmental. Within the past few months, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, there’s been a new urgency about racial justice. How quickly has the B Corp movement responded?

The movement has been actively involved in these issues all along. The B Lab created its JDEI Challenge several years ago, the “J” being for justice, which is a way for companies to track their own progress in their fight against systemic pay discrimination against women, for example.

All of this sounds commendable, but I wonder sometimes if there isn’t a backlash. Yes, consumers want to purchase products from companies that stand for something beyond making a profit. But when I buy ice cream, why should I even have to think about the fact that the company endorsed Bernie Sanders for president?

I’ve discussed this possibility of backlash with both Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia. They’re aware of it, sure. They recognize that this can be irritating to some consumers. But that’s OK with them. They’re willing to take a stand, and any pushback will only increase the commitment of their core customers.

Reach Marquis at 617.780.2814 or [email protected].