Abstract
Extreme events undermine progress towards social sustainability and urge an immediate and broad response from the private sector. Nevertheless, corporate interventions in the face of a shock differ from traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) actions in some essential aspects not addressed by the literature. To solve this gap, we propose a purpose-action framework to examine and categorize 218 post-shock CSR interventions from 111 companies operating in Spain during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework allows assessing their heterogeneous social sustainability impact. We identify a set of firm dynamic sustainability capabilities -leadership, intentionality, prior stakeholder engagement, and partnership building-underpinning corporate purpose and action to develop an effective and efficient post-shock CSR. This exploratory study extends the literature on the company–society interface and provides a guide to foster social sustainability through CSR in times of shock.
