Illustration to John Seabrook’s May 16, 2011 article “Snacks For A Fat Planet” in the New Yorker. showing: Indra Nooyi, the C.E.O. of PepsiCo, says it must be a “good company” in a moral sense.

The Military-Industrial Complex that then-exiting President Eisenhower warned about is unfortunately alive and well, as we saw in the previous decade, when journalists were mostly asleep at the wheel, often even contributors to the dark complex. But journalism has been reborn in some quarters with a new sense of purpose, and new approaches to vigilance that is worthy of the Fourth Estate. Diligent investigative journalism allied with advanced academic research-driven thinking skills produces a better complex.

Case in point: when accomplished academics such as Professor Aaron Chatterji share cogent, punchy follow up posts to articles that caught our attention years back, today’s news on labor activism meets yesterday’s analysis of the intersection of food/health trends and corporate buzz phrases like social responsibility. Thanks to this Duke University professor, New Yorker readers get follow up on a story that might otherwise have been fading, but should not:

Nooyi has backed up her rhetoric with concrete steps, acquiring healthier brands like Tropicana and Quaker Oats and creating Pepsi Next, a lower-calorie version of the flagship brand. She even hired a former official from the World Health Organization to oversee the reforms.Initially, Nooyi won wide acclaim for her efforts. Fortune hailed her as the most powerful woman in business five years in a row, and institutions including New York University and Duke University gave her honorary degrees.

However, Pepsi’s investors have long been skeptical. During her tenure, Coca-Cola’s stock price doubled while Pepsi stagnated, even losing its number-two position in the cola market to Diet Coke in 2010. Investors believe that Nooyi’s socially responsible vision is a bad business strategy that diverts resources from Pepsi’s successful, if unhealthy, core brands. Hundreds of millions of new consumers in emerging markets are clamoring to buy Pepsi’s existing products today, calories and all; with Pepsi’s marketing budget spread thin, they are buying Coke instead. Relenting to this pressure on the bottom line, Pepsi last year announced management changes and appeared to signal that it would step back from Nooyi’s “performance with a purpose” business strategy.

The Pepsi case shows that doing good does not always lead to doing well financially, a conclusion supported by decades of academic research. There are a lot of theories about how corporate social responsibility helps companies retain workers, keep them motivated and productive, and boost firms’ reputations, but real-world data doesn’t necessarily corroborate this. Nooyi’s high-profile setback is just another signal to other C.E.O.s about which bottom line matters most…

Read the whole post here.