Business Commons^™

Purpose In The For-Profit Firm: A Review And Framework For Management Research, Gerard George, Martine R. Haas, Anita M. Mcgahan, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Paul Tracey

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose is a concept often used in managerial communities to signal and define a firm’s benevolent and pluralistic approach to its stakeholders beyond its focus on shareholders. While some evidence has linked purpose to positive organizational outcomes such as growth, employee satisfaction, innovation, and superior stock market performance, the definition and application of purpose in management research has been varied and frequently ambiguous. We review literature streams that invoke purpose in the for-profit firm and propose a unifying definition. Next, we develop a framework to study purpose that decouples its framing and formalization within firms from its realization, thus helping …

Ecosystem Social Responsibility In International Digital Commerce, Jingtao Yi, Jiatao Li, Liang Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite the surge of interest in digital globalization, its social dimensions have received far less attention than deserved. The lack of conversation between the two prominent areas of IB research, digitalization, and corporate social responsibility, presents a valuable opportunity for extending the agenda Ioannou and Serafeim (J Int Bus Stud 43(9):834-864, 2012) pioneered a decade earlier. We briefly depict the organizational differences between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and multinational platforms (MNPs), followed by a closer look at how social responsibility of digital platforms might depart from our conventional understanding derived from MNEs. We then propose the notion of ecosystem social responsibility …

Sustainability Impact Assessment Of New Ventures: An Emerging Field Of Research, Klaus Fichter, Florian Ludeke-Freund, Stefan Schaltegger, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Entrepreneurs and start-ups are key actors in implementing environmental innovation and accelerating sustainability transitions. Thus, analyzing as well as predicting the impact of entrepreneurial ventures is central to management and entrepreneurship research. The sustainability performance, value and impact of incumbent firms and their products and services has been a key topic in business-related sustainability research for many years. However, assessing the sustainability effects of new ventures such as start-ups is a neglected area in the research literature. This article therefore provides an overview, including key definitions, a new conceptual framework, and notions that can help guide and inspire a future …

Dual Agenda Innovation: How Firms Pursue Economic And Environmental Goals Simultaneously, Tianni Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the increasing prevalence of UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) and ESG movement, more and more companies have started to include environmental performance as part of their strategic goals. From both risk management and value creation perspectives, not only is the positive environmental performance socially desirable, but it also can affect the economic performance. Companies strive to achieve superior environmental and economic performance (i.e.E2 performance), but few have succeeded.

In this dissertation research, the author proposed that firms are more likely to achieve superior E2 performance by engaging in dual agenda innovation that integrates environmental goal and economic goal in …

To Buy Green Or Not To Buy Green: Do Structural Dependencies Block Ecological Responsiveness?, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Teemu Kautonen, Henri Hakata

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite the significant increase in interest in sustainable business practices, decisions on switching to more environmentally friendly input materials are understudied. In a conjoint experiment, we presented 267 Finnish manufacturing firms with an opportunity to acquire an alternative, more ecological input material and investigated their willingness to switch to that material. We find that in general, firms are willing to substitute their current principal input with a more ecological alternative under conditions of functional parity. However, such willingness is contingent on the firm’s value creation structures. Specifically, if the products and processes driving the firm’s value creation rely more on …

Introduction To The Business Of Sustainability: An Organizing Framework For Theory, Practice And Impact, Gerard George, Martine R. Haas, Havovi Heerjee Joshi, Anita M. Mcgahan, Paul Tracey

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Human activity needs to become sustainable, and businesses have a massive role to play in it. Important progress has occurred. The Coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the importance of sustainability and resilience. Businesses have become champions of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both by integrating them into their core activities and by developing strategies and metrics to achieve them. Despite this progress, more must be done to achieve sustainability targets on a timetable that is relevant. While the narratives of businesses are often exciting, their follow-through with implementation remains limited. So too is information on successful practices, conceptual knowledge …

Are Native Plants Green? Assessing Environmental Performances Of Locally-Owned Facilities, Narae Lee, Jiao Luo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the impact of corporate ownership and community conditions on firm environmental pollution. While the existing literature often thinks of environmental pollution as a unitary construct, we emphasize the distinction between toxic emissions, which have immediate but locally bounded impact, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which have gradual but global impact, producing climate change. Using a facility-level panel of all manufacturing facilities in the US from 2010-2018, and leveraging within-facility changes in ownership status, we show that locally owned firms have lower levels of toxic emissions, but they are also less likely to report GHG emissions, and have higher …

Scarcity In The Twenty-First Century: How The Resource Nexus Affects Management, Simon J. D. Schillebeeckx, Mark Workman, Charles Dean

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Since theadvent of the 21st century and especially since the food andfinancial crisis in 2008, concerns about natural resource availability haveresurfaced. While scarcity concerns date back hundreds of years and arefoundational to economics, how scarcity is interpreted or framed has evolved significantlyin the last two centuries. In this chapter, we recount the evolving scarcity discourseand specifically address the most recent iteration that centres on the idea ofa resource nexus. While significant attention to the nexus has been paid bypolicy-makers and scholars interested in especially water, management scholarshave so far remained absent from these debates. Given recent calls to address grand …