Judith Walls

Measuring environmental strategy: Construct development, reliability, and validity

Inconsistent results in prior work that link environmental strategy to competitive advantage may be due to the empirical difficulties of marrying the theoretical connection between a firm’s resource base and its environmental strategy. The authors contribute to the field by developing a measure that is congruent with the natural resource—based view, a dominant paradigm in this line of work. This article content analyses company reports and secondary data to develop a measure of environmental strategy grounded in the natural resource—based view. They identify six environmental capabilities that form components of a reliable, multidimensional construct of proactive environmental strategy. They also identify a measure of reactive compliance strategy. They verify reliability of their new measure through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, establish convergent and discriminant validity via a multitrait, multimethod matrix and demonstrate superior predictive validity of their measure compared to two others commonly used in the literature. In the conclusion, they discuss implications for research and practice.

Organizational Perspectives of Industrial Symbiosis A Review and Synthesis

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative environmental action whereby firms share or exchange by-products, materials, energy, or waste as a way to economically reduce aggregate environmental impact. Research in IS has flourished over the past two decades, and the time is ripe for a coherent review of organizational perspectives on the topic, particularly since the practice of IS is rife with difficulties often attributed to “social” factors. We review the organizational perspectives found in IS literature using a two-dimensional framework considering the antecedents, consequences, lubricants, and limiters of IS assessed through institutional, network/system, organizational, and individual levels of analysis. Our framework highlights what organizational perspectives have been adopted so far and also points to avenues of future scholarship of this unique phenomenon.

Universal truths: can universally held cultural values inform the modern corporation?

Purpose – There are four criteria that people universally value: health, well-being, longevity, and environmental preservation. When these criteria are violated, a society becomes unsustainable. In order to preserve cultures, these four universal criteria therefore need to be taken into account. But nation states are no longer the dominant form of social organizing – corporations are. This raises questions about the role of corporations in preserving cultural values. How do corporations measure up to these four universal truths? Can corporations live up to these values, above and beyond financial performance, and does it matter? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Amidst a shifting trend toward vertical individualism which emphasizes personal needs, status, and hierarchy, the paper argues that the universal truths are more important than ever in the consideration of corporate social responsibility. Findings – The paper concludes that although most companies claim to be at...

Let’s talk: Examining Dialogue among Firms and Outside Actors on Social and Environmental Issues

Relying on the institutional logics perspective, we analyze the factors that enable dialogue between corporations and external actors on social and environmental issues.. We define an institutional context consisting of an overarching shareholder value logic, a social welfare logic and an environmental logic. Using data on shareholder activism, we found that both external actor power and CEO NGO experience are important features in fostering dialogue with corporations on both social and environmental issues. The external actor’s legitimacy, CEO’s NGO experience, and CEO participation in boards are significant factors to promote dialogue on social but not on environmental matters. CEO elite education, long-term CEO pay, and corporate visibility all have significant effects on enabling dialogue on environmental but not on social issues. These results indicate support the idea that social and environmental issues are rooted in different institutional logics.

Difference in Degrees: CEO Characteristics and Firm Responses to Pressures for Disclosure

We contribute to the literature on firms response to institutional pressures and environmental information disclosure. We hypothesize that CEO characteristics will influence firms likelihood of acquiescing to pressures to disclose environmental information, and that acquiescence, in turn, will affect subsequent environmental performance. We test our hypotheses by examining firms responses to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and find that firms led by newly appointed CEOs and CEOs with MBA degrees are more likely to respond to the CDP while those led by lawyers are less likely to respond. We also find the interaction of acquiescence and CEO characteristics to be associated with subsequent improvement in greenhouse gas emissions. Our results have implications for research on strategic response to institutional pressures and corporate environmental performance.

Regenerative Organizations: Living and Well-being in, with and for Nature

The symposium uses a hybrid paper-panel format to sample living mechanisms operating at the interface between organizations and their natural ecological systems. Eight papers demonstrate a wide...

The Power of One: How CEO Power Affects Corporate Environmental Sustainability

The role of top executives has received scant attention in corporate environmental strategy. In particular, the mechanisms underlying CEOs’ influence over the board of directors and the executive suite in pursuing environmental initiatives are not well understood. We propose that CEO power is a tool that allows CEOs to mobilize resources and influence others to ‘get things done’ based on two social sources of power. CEOs with informal ‘environmental expert’ power have a better understanding of environmental issues, giving them power to address them. This informal power to improve environmental performance is further leveraged by CEOs’ formal power over the top management team and board of directors. In addition, CEOs with informal power are able to translate shareholder pressure for corporate greening into meaningful action.