We define CSR as a firm's voluntary consideration of stakeholder concerns both within and outside its business operations. - Christian Homburg

Little is known about the interface between separate marketing units and sales units. This article develops a multidimensional model of the marketing and sales interface. The model integrates a broad range of conceptual domains, including information sharing, structural linkages, power, orientations, and knowledge of marketing and sales. The authors empirically explore the conceptual model through a cross-industry study of 337 European Union–based companies. They identify five empirical archetypes of the marketing and sales interface. The taxonomy shows that the role and characteristics of marketing and sales vary a great deal. This finding challenges existing stereotypes about marketing and sales. Finally, the article explores organizational outcomes of the five configurations. The findings suggest that the most successful configurations are characterized by strong structural linkages between marketing and sales and a high extent of market knowledge in marketing.

The notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained momentum and is currently of strategic importance for many companies. Among Fortune 500 companies, as many as 90% have explicit CSR initiatives, more than half publish a separate annual CSR report, and most have senior executives responsible for CSR (Luo and Bhattacharya 2009; McKinsey & Company 2009).

Despite the high relevance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in current business practice and the considerable research on CSR outcomes in consumer markets, investigations of its influence on organizational business relationships are scarce. Relying on instrumental stakeholder theory the authors develop and empirically test a framework of the influence of a supplier's CSR engagement on organizational customer outcomes. Findings from an examination of 200 cross-industry supplier-customer dyads reveal positive effects of two facets of a supplier's CSR efforts on customer loyalty through distinct mechanisms. Business practice GSR fosters customers' trust, whereas philanthropic CSR strengthens customer-company identification. The authors distinguish a supplier's actual GSR engagement and customers' perception of these GSR activities. In addition, they consider central contingency factors reflecting uncertainty and dependence in business-to-business relationships that determine the effectiveness of GSR.