Supererogation: Beyond Positive Deviance and Corporate Social Responsibility

The special class of supererogatory actions—those that go “beyond the call of duty”—has thus far been omitted from the management literature. Rather, actions of a firm that may surpass economic and legal requirements have been discussed either under the umbrella term of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or the concept of positive deviance as articulated by the Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) movement. This paper seeks to clarify how “duty” is understood in these literatures and makes an argument that paradigmatic examples of corporate supererogation in fact lie beyond what is traditionally conceptualized as CSR and positive deviance. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of research on Positive Organizational Ethics, as well as both the CSR and POS literatures, by presenting an extended deontological framework of CSR and bringing conceptual clarity to an otherwise muddied domain.