---
id: "pisquared:interview/burbano-vanessa"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Vanessa Burbano"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/burbano-vanessa"
date: "2026-08-24"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Vanessa Burbano"]
summary: "Vanessa Burbano is the Donald C. Waite III Associate Professor of Social Enterprise in the strategy area at Columbia Business School. She studies the..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1222565261"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Vanessa Burbano

Vanessa Burbano, Donald C. Waite III Associate Professor of Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School · 24 August 2026

## About the guest

Vanessa Burbano is the Donald C. Waite III Associate Professor of Social Enterprise in the strategy area at Columbia Business School. She studies the strategic implications of socially responsible and irresponsible firm practices; in particular, how they influence employee behavior. Her body of work has been recognized with the 2021 Emerging Scholar Award from the Strategic Management division of the Academy of Management, and the 2021 Emerging Sustainability Scholar Award from the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. She was also named to Poets and Quants’ 2019 list of Best 40 Business School Professors Under 40. Her work has been published across our top journals and recognized with a wide range of awards. She has also been cited in the popular press, including in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and The Financial Times. In addition to editorial positions, she also serves as the Corporate Engagement Director and Executive Committee Member of LEAP, an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) dedicated to improving the accuracy of climate projections needed for optimal adaptation to climate change.

## Reflections from the interview

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.

## Related resources

- [Vanessa’s website at Columbia](https://business.columbia.edu/faculty/people/vanessa-burbano/)
- [Vanessa on Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s3_lqY8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao)
- [Vanessa’s 2011 paper on Greenwashing](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1525/cmr.2011.54.1.64)
- [Vanessa’s paper on social impact activity on employee turnover](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01517)
- [Vanessa’s paper on LLMs and irresponsible business practices](https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smj.70023)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1222565261

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/burbano-vanessa · Licence: none stated