Businesses promote their environmental awareness through green buildings, eco-labels, sustainability reports, industry pledges and clean technologies. When are these symbols wasteful corporate spin, ...and when do they signal authentic environmental improvements? Based on twenty years of research, three rich case studies, a strong theoretical model and a range of practical applications, this book provides the first systematic analysis of the drivers and consequences of symbolic corporate environmentalism. It addresses the indirect cost of companies' symbolic actions and develops a new concept of the 'social energy penalty' - the cost to society when powerful corporate actors limit the social conversation on environmental problems and their solutions. This thoughtful book develops a set of tools for researchers, regulators and managers to separate useful environmental information from empty corporate spin, and will appeal to researchers and students of corporate responsibility, corporate environmental strategy and sustainable business, as well as environmental practitioners.
Research Summary: Much of the research on corporate collective action to manage common pool resources is focused on coordinated actions, such as voluntary programs, rather than collaborative actions, ...such as technology sharing. In this article, we examine inductively the collective actions taken by a consortium of 12 oil sands companies to address three environmental issues of different scale. We identified a set of organizing rules that determined whether the relationship among industry members would be collaborative or competitive, and found that the organizing rules for collaborative collective action were more effective for smaller scale issues (i.e., tailings ponds and water) than the larger scale issue (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions). Our findings contribute to research on the competitive dynamics of collaborating with competitors and on industry self-regulation. Managerial Summary: Many environmental issues, such as climate change, water quality, and contaminated land, are caused by the overexploitation of commonly shared natural resources. Firms will often overuse resources because their cost of use is less than the benefit that accrues. In Alberta's oil sands, 12 of the major oil sands operators, all competitors, have agreed to collaborate by sharing technology, which goes against the received wisdom of competition. This multiparty collaboration among competitors, while still relatively rare, is becoming increasingly commonplace. In this article, we outline the rules that allow this collaboration to flourish. Our most important finding is that the rules are shaped by the scale of the issue being managed, not the size of the collaboration.
The relationship between innovation and firm performance has been uncertain. In previous empirical tests of both causal directions of the organizational performance and innovation relationship, the ...temporal sequence of research designs has often been flawed. We meta-analytically test both temporal sequences of this relationship using 158 effect sizes from 55 empirical studies. We find that many empirical studies hypothesized one temporal sequence (e.g. innovation and future performance), but used data based on the opposite temporal sequence (e.g. past performance and innovation). Correcting the studies based on the actual temporal sequence used reveals that while the relationship between innovation and future performance is positive (based on economic rent-seeking), the relationship between past performance and innovation is less clear, especially when the study's framing is taken into account. Focusing on temporal sequencing suggests new research avenues on the organizational performance and innovation relationship.
When is industry self-regulation (ISR) a legitimate form of governance? In principle, ISR can serve the interests of participating companies, regulators and other stakeholders. However, in practice, ...empirical evidence shows that ISR schemes often under-perform, leading to criticism that such schemes are tantamount to firms marking their own homework. In response, this paper explains how current management theory on ISR has failed to separate the pragmatic legitimacy of ISR based on selfinterested calculations, from moral legitimacy based on normative approval. The paper traces three families of management theory on ISR and uses these to map the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of ISR schemes. It identifies tensions between the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of ISR schemes, which the current ISR literature does not address, and draws implications for the future theory and practice of ISR.
Managers realize that they should avoid complex green supply initiatives when they do not have the capabilities to implement them. However, they have little guidance on how these capabilities can be ...developed. This paper provides an initial analysis of the role of supply management capabilities in green supply. We argue that the implementation of green supply is better explained by focusing on the development and deployment of an organization's specialized internal resources, rather than by the more usual focus on external environmental pressures on a firm. Further, we argue that capabilities appropriate for green supply are developed by a proactive corporate environmental stance and by a more strategic purchasing and supply management approach.
We test our model using data from a two‐phase survey of 70 operating units within UK public limited companies. Our results indicate support for our conjecture that supply management capabilities are jointly developed by a proactive corporate environmental approach and a strategic purchasing and supply process. Our study results should be useful to business strategists, regulators, and researchers interested in the predictors of corporate green behavior. They should also assist future researchers in many branches of environmental management who are seeking to explore the role of the internal capabilities of firms in supporting environmental management.
Latest estimates suggest that widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) could account for up to one-fifth of the needed global reduction in CO
2 emissions by 2050. Governments are ...attempting to stimulate investments in CCS technology both directly through subsidizing demonstration projects, and indirectly through developing price incentives in carbon markets. Yet, corporate decision-makers are finding CCS investments challenging. Common explanations for delay in corporate CCS investments include operational concerns such as the high cost of capture technologies, technological uncertainties in integrated CCS systems and underdeveloped regulatory and liability regimes. In this paper, we place corporate CCS adoption decisions within a technology strategy perspective. We diagnose four underlying characteristics of the strategic CCS technology adoption decision that present unusual challenges for decision-makers: such investments are precautionary, sustaining, cumulative and situated. Understanding CCS as a corporate technology strategy challenge can help us move beyond the usual list of operational barriers to CCS and make public policy recommendations to help overcome them.
► Presents a corporate technology strategy perspective on carbon capture and storage (CCS). ► CCS technology is precautionary, sustaining, cumulative and situated. ► Decision-makers need to look beyond cost and risk as barriers to investment in CCS.
•The article draws on orchestration to address multi-layer tensions in city data ecosystems.•We present a case study of London's city data ecosystem within 2017-2019.•Openness, diffusion and shared ...vision identified as key to orchestrate city data ecosystems.•Multiple individual and collective orchestrators can be crucial within city data ecosystems.•Contributes to an integrated view of city data and highlights the dynamics of interaction between city entities.
Research on smart cities has illustrated the use of data analytics, open data, smart sensors and other data-intensive applications that have significant potential to transform urban environments. As the complexity and intensity of these projects has increased, there is a need to understand smart city data ecosystems as an integrated view of data applications by the various city entities that operate within an institutional environment. This paper examines how authorities involved in such ecosystems coordinate data initiatives from an orchestration perspective. A case study of London's city data initiatives highlights the challenges faced in complex city data environments and the importance of an integrated view. Three elements of orchestration in smart city data ecosystems – namely openness, diffusion and shared vision– are identified as the main enablers of city data initiatives within London's local government authorities. The study contributes to our theoretical understanding of orchestration within data ecosystems, as well as the social and technological impacts of city data.
Organizational slack seems to have an ambiguous relationship with corporate greening. On the one hand, excess resources can be used to experiment with new environmental innovations, or potential ...green market segments. On the other, excess resources can be used to build corporate buffers against pressures for environmental improvement, such as large corporate environmental departments or environmental lobbying activity, and resist changes to the core of the organization. This paper begins to resolve these conflicting arguments by broadening the debate on organizational slack and corporate greening. It builds on recent empirical studies of slack and corporate greening, and recognizes the many potential roles that different types of slack may play in a dynamic decision–making context. Using a theoretical framework suggested by Bourgeois (1981), the paper systematizes and draws lessons from examples of the roles of slack encountered in a recent series of 35 interviews within UK public limited companies. It concludes that future treatments of slack and environmental management should incorporate a more holistic view of slack, which recognizes its dynamic, complex and often contradictory effects on decision–making in organizations.
Alternative approaches to environmental regulation have gained much attention in recent years. Information-based regulation is an increasingly popular type of instrument that refers to the use of ...ratings, rankings, labels, online inventories and similar public disclosure practices by regulators. Such schemes vary in their design, disclosure formats, mechanisms to influence behaviour and performance. Theoretical and practical questions remain about whether and how regulators can use voluntary and/or beyond compliance disclosures. The article develops a classification of information-based schemes based on whether the scheme is mandatory or voluntary, and whether the disclosures reveal compliance or beyond compliance performance behaviours. The classification is used to show how the different schemes (traditional, assurance, performance and proactive) work in practice with their associated risks, benefits and mechanisms. While regulators are experimenting with this new frontier of regulation, it is not yet clear whether all types of schemes will be sufficiently robust to deliver on the promise they hold for enthusiasts of smart regulation. We conclude with implications and future research questions on the nature of voluntariness and compliance in information-based regulation.
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•Information-based regulation is the use of public disclosure practices like ratings, rankings and labels•Classification of schemes based on mandatory/voluntary and compliance/beyond compliance•Presents case studies and illustrative examples of how the classification works in practice•Discusses implications of voluntariness and compliance as schemes evolve•Provides recommendations for designing and implementing information-based schemes
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