---
id: "pisquared:interview/wang-heli"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Heli Wang"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/wang-heli"
date: "2026-10-09"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Heli Wang"]
summary: "Heli Wang is the Janice Bellace Professor of Strategic Management and Dean of College of Graduate Research Studies at Singapore Management University. Her..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1234416205"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Heli Wang

Heli Wang, Janice Bellace Professor of Strategic Management, Singapore Management University · 9 October 2026

## About the guest

Heli Wang is the Janice Bellace Professor of Strategic Management and Dean of College of Graduate Research Studies at Singapore Management University. Her research, which focuses on the resource-based view of the firm, strategic human capital, stakeholder management, and corporate social responsibility, has been published in our leading journals. Heli holds a PhD from the Ohio State University. She has won countless awards for her research, and co-organized a wide range of scholarly conferences and symposia, including this year, when she hosted the Strategic Management Society’s Special Conference on Stakeholder Governance in Hong Kong. She has served as associate editors of Academy of Management Journal and Academy of Management Review, and is currently on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management.

## Reflections from the interview

Heli explains how her early work grew out of the resource-based view of the firm. Highly firm-specific resources, including employees' specialized skills, create competitive advantage but also expose both the firm and its stakeholders to risk if conditions change. That interest in stakeholder risk led her to corporate philanthropy, which she approached as a strategic activity that builds goodwill, trust, and relational capital rather than simple gifting. It also led to her influential 2011 *AMJ* paper on philanthropy, financial performance, and stakeholder response, which showed how philanthropy can open political access in China and helped shape the non-market strategy field. Her later CSR work moved from testing the CSR–performance link toward looking inside the "black box" of what companies actually do, in areas such as donations, the environment, and employee welfare. She and Anita agree that CSR does not directly raise financial returns but supports legitimacy, access to resources, and a firm's license to operate.

In the second half, Heli discusses the current backlash against ESG and DEI, especially U.S. state-level anti-ESG legislation. She argues that companies with real commitments, such as investments in facilities, operations, and innovation, generally don't reverse course. Many change how they communicate their efforts rather than what they do, and she is optimistic that a significant number of firms stay committed to their core practices. For her current work, she describes a field experiment on how NGOs influence corporate environmental compliance. It compares confrontational pressure with collaborative help, and finds that engaging a company's other stakeholders works better than approaching the company directly. She is also writing a conceptual paper on "CSR externalities," where a well-intentioned action helps one group but harms another, as in the example of a school-attendance program reducing family income. She argues these externalities are harder to address than classic ones because moral ambiguity makes it difficult to hold companies accountable.

## Related resources

- [Heli’s profile at SMU](https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/wang-heli-1596)
- [Heli on Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cI3f1kEAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao)
- [Heli’s paper with Cuili Qian in the AMJ](https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2009.0548)
- [Heli’s paper on research directions on corporate social responsibilty](https://journals.aom.org/doi/full/10.5465/amj.2016.5001)
- [Heli’s paper on state vs. local control of policy](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01492063231197390)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1234416205

## 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/wang-heli · Licence: none stated