What We Know and Don't Know About Corporate Social Responsibility: A Review and Research Agenda

An Organizational Theoretic Review of Green Supply Chain Management Literature

Applying institutional theory, we argue that environmentally legitimate firms incur less unsystematic stock market risk than illegitimate firms. Firms earn environmental legitimacy when their performance with respect to the natural environment conforms to stakeholders' expectations. This relationship was supported with the analysis of media reports and stock prices of 100 firms over a five-year period. The analysis also showed that firms with low environmental legitimacy can attenuate this effect by expressing commitment to the natural environment.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20159562

Talking Trash: Legitimacy, Impression Management, and Unsystematic Risk in the Context of the Natural Environment

This paper combines new and old institutionalism to explain differences in organizational strategies. We propose that differences in the influence of corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different external pressures and thus adopt different management practices. Specifically, we argue that external constituents - including customers, regulators, legislators, local communities, and environmental activist organizations - who interact with influential corporate departments are more likely to affect facility managers' decisions. As a result, managers of facilities that are subjected to comparable institutional pressures adopt distinct sets of management practices that appease different external constituents. We test our framework in the context of the adoption of environmental management practices using an original survey and archival data obtained for nearly 500 facilities. We find support for these hypotheses.

Organizational Responses to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box

In this article, we respond to calls by previous researchers to clarify the function of decentralized institutions by analyzing the strategic motives of individual actors. We investigated an important type of decentralized institution, certified management standards, and theorized that firms use these institutions to reduce problems that might arise with exchange partners that lack information or fear opportunism. We tested this theory using the pattern of certification with the ISO 14001 management standard.

http://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploads/faculty/andrew-king/King_Lenox_Terlaak.pdf

The Strategic Use of Decentralized Institutions: Exploring Certification with the Iso 14001 Management Standard

Many firms worldwide have adopted environmental management systems, and some have taken the extra step and had their systems certified for the international standard ISO 14001. While institutional pressures and market demand often motivate firms to adopt an EMS, the reasons why they certify for ISO 14001 are less clear. In this study, we interviewed members of the Canadian pulp and paper industry who had either an EMS or ISO 14001 certification to understand why they may have become ISO 14001 certified. We found that task visibility and environmental impact opacity lead to differences in a firm's approach to ISO 14001 certification in the absence of coercive pressures.

Seeing the Need for ISO 14001

In this paper, we offer a comprehensive alliance portfolio diversity construct that includes partner, functional, and governance diversity. Grounding our work primarily with the resource and dynamic capabilities-based views, we argue that increased diversity in partners’ industry, organizational, and national background will incur added complexity and coordination costs but will provide broadened resource and learning benefits. Increased functional diversity results in a more balanced portfolio of exploration and exploitation activities that expands the firm’s knowledge base while increased governance diversity inhibits learning and routine building. Hypotheses were tested with alliance portfolio and performance data for 138 multinational firms in the global automobile industry during the twenty-year period from 1985 to 2005. We found alliance portfolios with greater organizational and functional diversity and lower governance diversity were related to higher firm performance while industry diversity had a U-shaped relationship with firm performance. We suggest firms manage their alliances with a portfolio perspective, seeking to maximize resource and learning benefits by collaborating with a variety of organizations in various value chain activities while minimizing managerial costs through a focused set of governance structures.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1626349_code1500033.pdf?abstractid=1626349&mirid=1&type=2

Alliance Portfolio Diversity and Firm Performance

In this paper, we offer a comprehensive alliance portfolio diversity construct that includes partner, functional, and governance diversity. Grounding our work primarily with the resource- and dynamic capabilities-based views, we argue that increased diversity in partners' industry, organizational, and national background will incur added complexity and coordination costs but will provide broadened resource and learning benefits. Increased functional diversity results in a more balanced portfolio of exploration and exploitation activities that expands the firm's knowledge base while increased governance diversity inhibits learning and routine building. Hypotheses were tested with alliance portfolio and performance data for 138 multinational firms in the global automobile industry during the twenty-year period from 1985 to 2005. We found alliance portfolios with greater organizational and functional diversity and lower governance diversity were related to higher firm performance while industry diversity had a U-shaped relationship with firm performance. We suggest firms manage their alliances with a portfolio perspective, seeking to maximize resource and learning benefits by collaborating with a variety of organizations in various value chain activities while minimizing managerial costs through a focused set of governance structures. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Alliance portfolio diversity and firm performance

Time compression diseconomies in foreign expansion

How fast do firms expand in a foreign market after their initial entry? Under what conditions is it beneficial or detrimental for a firm to move fast in setting up subsequent subsidiaries? We attem...

Ruihua Joy Jiang

Papers

Seeing the Need for ISO 14001

Alliance Portfolio Diversity and Firm Performance

Alliance portfolio diversity and firm performance

Time compression diseconomies in foreign expansion

Timing and performance of post-entry foreign subsidiaries.