Conceptualizing social impact: A geographic perspective

Firms have used different approaches to determining the social impacts of their actions. However, identifying and quantifying firms’ social impact remain a challenge. This paper provides theoretical arguments regarding firms’ social impact based on a geographic perspective. This approach uses geo-referenced data on social impact parameters, such as health, crime, real estate values, and green spaces. This study extends the corporate social responsibility literature by incorporating a geographic perspective of social impacts and highlighting geographic proximity as a relevant element of stakeholder salience and firm response. This study implies the need to develop a facility-level social impact index based on publicly available data to evaluate social impact beyond current rating systems.