In this episode, host Anita McGahan interviews Vanessa Burbano, the Donald C. Waite III Associate Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, about her research on socially responsible and irresponsible corporate practices. Burbano traces her work back to her early, widely cited paper with Magali Delmas that helped popularize the term "greenwashing," and argues the phenomenon remains hard to pin down because identifying it depends entirely on how well we can measure the gap between what firms say and what they actually do.  Vanessa expects better information access and AI to make those inconsistencies easier for individuals and NGOs to spot now. The conversation then turns to how the terrain has shifted: practices that counted as uncontroversial CSR two decades ago now fall under politically charged "corporate social activism," and many firms are actively retrenching on DEI and climate commitments, scrubbing earlier stances from their websites. Burbano suggests the firms not retrenching are the ones that embedded these values in actual practice rather than in claims, and that the path to real benefits may be to do the work without fanfare. Anita asks about two 2024 Management Science papers on employee retention under authentic pro-social investment and on the gender gap in meaningful work.  Vanessa finds that women report deriving greater meaning from work, with implications for job selection, though she is careful to say the finding doesn't justify or explain the gender pay gap. They close on where CSR research should head next: measuring effects on society rather than just firm performance, moving beyond the firm as the unit of analysis, and understanding underlying mechanisms.  Vanessa ends by reflecting that what energizes her is being told a question is too hard to study rigorously and then finding a way to study it anyway.