A Diagnostic Tool for Tracking Purpose–Practice Decoupling Over Time

• Abiodun Okunola

  Ladoke Akintola University Technology

  Author

Organizations increasingly articulate corporate purpose commitments that outpace substantive implementation, yet existing diagnostic instruments capture decoupling only as a static snapshot rather than a dynamic trajectory. This study addresses the absence of a validated, longitudinal instrument for tracking purpose–practice decoupling by developing and testing the Purpose–Practice Decoupling Tracker (PPDT), a composite index integrating disclosure semantics, resource allocation signals, and operational outcome indicators. Drawing on a retrospective panel of 184 publicly listed firms across three reporting periods (2021–2023), the study combines natural language processing of purpose statements with financial and operational ratio analysis. The PPDT achieves 89.4% classification accuracy (F1 = 0.87, AUC = 0.91) in distinguishing persistently decoupled firms from those demonstrating tightening coupling over time, outperforming static ESG-gap baselines by 23.6 percentage points. Feature importance analysis identifies narrative specificity decay (weight = 0.31) and resource–rhetoric ratio divergence (weight = 0.27) as the strongest temporal predictors. The findings establish decoupling as a measurable trajectory rather than a binary state, offering administrators and regulators a replicable monitoring instrument while extending performative theories of corporate purpose into the domain of longitudinal diagnostic assessment.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abiodun Okunola (Author)

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