Many companies communicate about their corporate sustainability (CS) activities to demonstrate conformity with their stakeholders’ expectations. This communication is known as CS talk. Challenging the common notion of CS talk as a backward-looking description of completed CS activities, studies increasingly take a formative perspective on CS talk that acknowledges its potential to trigger CS-related organizational change (i.e., CS walk). Based on this view, we introduce a nuanced theoretical framework linking CS talk and walk, suggesting that, although CS talk evokes future CS walk, companies can also talk too much, causing an adverse effect that inhibits them from walking their talk. Furthermore, we argue that the performative effect of CS talk gradually unfolds within companies, initiating symbolic CS walk before translating into substantive CS walk. To test our theorizing, we created a text-based measure for CS talk and matched it with secondary data, assembling a sample of 820 US companies listed in the S&P 1500 over 15 years. The analysis supports our theorizing and contributes to research at the intersection of CS-related communication and organizational change, providing novel insights into the shape of the performative effect of CS talk and the organizational change process it initiates.
