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 …

Neutralization Of Fuel Tankering Emissions For Environmental Sustainability, Peter O'Reilly, Maria Petrescu, Fabricio Sulzbacher, Diogo Coutinho

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

As aviation has been one of the fastest-growing sources of emissions, this paper explores sustainable solutions in the equation of the economic savings from the fuel tankering practice, in a way it could represent gains of credibility for this industry (Boussauw & Vanoutrive, 2019). The fuel expenses in Brazil have been responsible for the highest operational cost for the airlines and, as a result, there has been an ongoing pursuit of the highest level of efficiency (ANAC, 2019). In this context, this study has been focused on the emerging Brazilian aviation market, and uses primary data collected from three major …

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 …

Competitive Sustainability: The Intersection Of Sustainability And Business Success, Clyde Eiríkur Hull

Articles

Sustainability that beats the competition is different from sustainability that does not. Some who care very much about sustainability may not care at all about business success. However, they should. If businesses were to see that competitive sustainability leads to financial success, they would take it up and abandon nonsustainable practices

Making Sustainability A Core Competency: Consumer Response To Sustainable Innovative Products, Clyde Eiríkur Hull, Jennifer D. Russell, Monika Kukar-Kinney

Articles

Research suggests that sustainability may not be sufficient to yield a competitive advantage. Building on the resource-based view, this research evaluates three questions: (1) Can using sustainability as a differentiator lead to consumers choosing sustainable products? (2) Does product sustainability appeal more to environmentally concerned consumers? (3) Does product sustainability appeal more when paired with innovation? To test the hypotheses, an online survey of 344 US respondents was conducted. Consumers were given a hypothetical budget for an office chair and asked to choose between two products at a time. Hypotheses were tested with frequency and Chisquare tests and logistic regression. …

Defining Regenerative Business Through The Context Of Place: A Case Study West Michigan Businesses, Aislinn Teachout, Aislinn Teachout

Masters Theses

This study builds upon existing scholarly literature on regenerative design and regenerative sustainability by relating the framework to existing West Michigan businesses and their place-specific practices. Applying concepts from those more developed fields to business sustainability, this paper contributes to the still emerging field of regenerative business by proposing a comprehensive definition of regenerative business. The definition is then applied to three businesses in a case study format to highlight regenerative business practices. While none of the businesses highlighted claim to be regenerative, all have examples of practices that demonstrate regenerative action and enhance the West Michigan community.

By defining …

Support New Business To Solve Old Problems With Kentucky’S Keystone Waste From Bourbon & Brewing, Samuel C. Kessler

Commonwealth Policy Papers

Provided here is a policy solution from the backside of Kentucky bourbon and brewing to upcycle Kentucky’s “keystone” wastes and grow businesses in the process. Potential effects range from removing the bottleneck on bourbon production and producing GHG-friendly biogas to lowering the price of milk.This full whitepaper brief provides an incentive model for keystone wastes which have a provider and a use. It is equally applicable for policymakers or advocates wishing to place a policy incentive behind waste-to-product upcycling, businesses involved with methane sequestration & renewable biogas energy, and shifting regulatory and penalizing models of pollution into incentive model for …

Regenerative Tourism Model: Challenges Of Adapting Concepts From Natural Science To Tourism Industry, Asif Hussain, Marie Haley

Journal of Sustainability and Resilience

The study proposes a regenerative tourism model. The application of the natural science ideas of regeneration needs to be clarified before the tourism industry can adopt a regenerative tourism model. Without such clarification, there is a high risk of ‘green washing’ and inappropriate adaption of a regenerative model. The borrowing of natural science to industry and its application in social sciences confuse the essence of the true concept of regeneration. In a regenerative agriculture context restoring a holistic system that mimics nature and includes social and economic spheres contributes to improving the whole system. When a social system aims to …

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 …

Mountains, Not Mines: The Issue Of Coal Mining On The Eastern Slopes, Tyler Tisdelle

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research is a qualitative analysis of the issue of coal mining on the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and specifically, how social and environmental organizing interacts with corporations and creates change among the institutions of our society.

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 …

Stewardship 2021: The Centrality Of Institutional Investor Regulation To Restoring A Fair And Sustainable American Economy, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, which formed the basis for the luncheon keynote speech at the Rethinking Stewardship online conference presented by the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School and ECGI, the European Corporate Governance Institute, the essential, but not sufficient, role of regulation to promote more effective stewardship by institutional investors is discussed. To frame specific policy recommendations that align the responsibilities of institutional investors with the best interests of their human investors in sustainable wealth creation, environmental responsibility, the respectful treatment of stakeholders, and, in particular, the fair pay and treatment of …

Re-Thinking ‘Sustainability’: Management And Organization Theorizing For A More-Than-Human-World, Seray Ergene

Doctoral Dissertations

A widespread conversation has emerged around the concept of sustainability in management theory and practice today. The origins of this notion have forwarded a vision of economic development for improving social conditions in different parts of the world, as well as promoting environmental protection to reduce the harmful effects of economic activity on Earth (Brundtland Report, 1987). Emerging from these origins, solving sustainability problems today has come to signify attending to three seemingly distinct pillars: social equity, environmental protection, and economic development. In this dissertation I join these conversations by following recent theoretical discussions suggesting the pillars are actually interrelated …

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 …

Sustainability In The Apparel Industry: A Study Of Self-Regulatory Institutions And Logic Hybridization Processes, Yoojung Ahn

Doctoral Dissertations

Scholars have sought to understand the relationship between organizations and institutions, and research to date has generated findings that speak to both the top down effects of institutions on organizations as enabling and constraining, and the bottom up influence of organizations shaping institutions. This dissertation explores the context of sustainability in the apparel industry and inquires how organizations participate in self-regulation to influence institutional change, using a mixed methods approach to understand this question. In particular, I observe the process of building a specific self-regulatory institution – the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC). First, I study the impact of a reputation …

New Belgium Brewing Company And B Corporation Certification, Kent Walker Dr., Taylor Laporte

Odette School of Business Publications

This case discusses the American craft-brewing company New Belgium Brewing (NBB), where the director of sustainability, Katie Wallace, must decide whether to invest significant company resources into becoming a B Corp certified company. More specifically, she must present her recommendation to the board of directors and to employees who are also shareholders. B Corporation is part of a non-profit organization encouraging sustainable business similar to LEED certification for construction or Fair Trade certification for coffee and chocolate. The idea behind B Corp certification is to use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.

New Belgium Brewing has …

An Application Of Social Media Marketing For Community Sustainable Development, Lei Huang, Amelia Clarke, Wen Tian, Natalie Heldsinger

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

Though the social marketing approach has been developed from commercial marketing, it is a holistic approach from various social sciences disciplines like marketing, psychology, sociology, mass communication and economics. It is basically an art to explore new ways of analyzing problems and solving them effectively. For instance, social marketing influences sustainability through the use of marketing principles to increase awareness, understanding, change attitudes, and motivate the society to change, adopt, or sustain a particular behavior. This paper attempts to explore a framework of social media in light of disseminating the knowledge of a community-wide sustainability plan among various stakeholders. Policy …

A Research Agenda For Advancing The Marketer's Understanding Of Ethical Consumption In A Post-Modern World, Julie M. Pharr

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

The attribution of moral significance to the choice of everyday consumer goods may well mean that personal consumption is increasingly viewed as an ethical exercise and not simply an economic transaction.

Consumer behavior has emerged as an important moral battleground in the 21^st century. Those in doubt of this statement need look no farther than their local Catholic church. In a church encyclical released 06.18.15, Pope Francis called for radical transformation not only of global politics and economics but of individual lifestyles in the battle to confront the environmental deterioration of Earth. An encyclical is a document that serves …

Green Freight Asia (C): The Road Ahead, Jason Woodard, Christopher Dula

C. Jason Woodard

Green Freight Asia is a three-part case series featured in the 2014 APEX Business-IT Global Case Challenge. The case is best used for group projects or workshop assignments concerning business-IT related topics. In this case, students take on the role of a small firm pitching to collaborate with GFA on an IT solution partnership to support GFA’s programme for the adoption of green freight practices in the Asia Pacific region. The case could also be adapted for classroom facilitation with adequate preparation.

Green Freight Asia (C): The Road Ahead is the third and final part of the case series. It …

Green Freight Asia (A): Driving The Adoption Of Sustainable Supply Chain Practices, Jason Woodard, Christopher Dula

C. Jason Woodard

Green Freight Asia is a three-part case series featured in the 2014 APEX Business-IT Global Case Challenge. The case is best used for group projects or workshop assignments concerning business-IT related topics. In this case, students take on the role of a small firm pitching to collaborate with GFA on an IT solution partnership to support GFA’s programme for the adoption of green freight practices in the Asia Pacific region. The case could also be adapted for classroom facilitation with adequate preparation. The first part, Green Freight Asia (A): Driving the Adoption of Sustainable Supply Chain Practices, chronicles the formation …

Green Freight Asia (B): Navigating Toward A Successful Partnership, Jason Woodard, Christopher Dula

C. Jason Woodard

Green Freight Asia is a three-part case series featured in the 2014 APEX Business-IT Global Case Challenge. The case is best used for group projects or workshop assignments concerning business-IT related topics. In this case, students take on the role of a small firm pitching to collaborate with GFA on an IT solution partnership to support GFA’s programme for the adoption of green freight practices in the Asia Pacific region. The case could also be adapted for classroom facilitation with adequate preparation. The second part, Green Freight Asia (B): Navigating Toward A Successful Partnership, explores how a collaborative partnership between …

Sustainable Innovation At Rei, Joe Lawless

MICCSR Case Studies

Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) was founded in the 1930’s as a co-op for climbers to acquire quality gear. As a major (US) retailer of outdoor equipment and gear, REI has been a leader in sustainability with everything from their products and packaging design, retail building efficiency and contributions to environmental conservation and outdoor recreation. This mini-case offers students an opportunity to explore the “Catalyzing Experiences” section of REI’s new sustainability integration initiative. Looking at the new sharing economy and innovative business models will challenge students to develop creative solutions to the consumption-based economic model of traditional retailers.

Mathematical Modeling For Platform-Based Product Configuration Considering Total Life-Cycle Sustainability, Tian Lan

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

Many companies are using platform-based product designs to fulfill the requirements of customers while maintaining low cost. However, research that integrates sustainability into platform-based product design is still limited. Considering sustainability during platform-based design process is a challenge because the total life-cycle from pre-manufacturing, manufacturing and use to post-use stages as well as economic, environmental and societal performance in these stages must be considered. In this research, an approach for quantifying sustainability is introduced and a mathematical model is developed for identifying a more sustainable platform. Data from life-cycle assessment is used to quantify environmental factors; criteria from the Product …

Corporate Sustainability And The Role Of The Consumer: Three Essays, Jeffrey Gauthier

Doctoral Dissertations

The challenge of sustainability has become an increasingly important concern for organizations. Sustainability raises new questions of legitimacy for organizations, compelling them to address stakeholder expectations of economic, environmental, and social performance. Although consumer stakeholders act as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy for many firms, we know little about how consumers may influence corporate sustainability. This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the role of consumers in influencing corporate sustainability. The first essay examines how companies may attempt to manage sustainability ratings assigned by ratings agencies in an attempt to retain consumer stakeholder support. I argue that an understanding …

Three Essays On The Enterprise Strategy For Multinational Firms, Veselina Plamenova Vracheva

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The enterprise strategy (ES) of the firm is the overarching organizational strategy which reflects the firm's degree of integration with society. It asks, "What do we stand for?" Very little is known about the ES; however, it is an important construct which can deepen our understanding of the stakeholder management process and the firm's long-term performance. Unlike much previous ES research, this three-essay dissertation examines both the nature of and the antecedents for ES in a cross-national setting.

The introductory essay offers a conceptual model describing the organizational identity orientation effects on the multinational enterprise's (MNE) ES. Additionally, it shows …

Understanding The Attitude-Behavior Gap For Renewable Energy Systems Using Behavioral Reasoning Theory, Aidan O'Driscoll, Marius Claudy, Mark Peterson

Articles

Consumer adoption of renewable energies is an important step towards less carbon-intensive and more sustainable energy systems. But despite growing ecological awareness and articulated preferences for green products, renewable energies face slow rates of diffusion in consumer markets. This has been hard to explain given consumers’ favorability to the concept of products that lower one’s impact on the natural environment. This study uses data from 254 homeowners in Ireland to investigate the psychological process of adopting a renewable energy system – solar energy panels. Applying Behavioral Reasoning Theory (BRT), this research examines a proposed model in which reasons both for …

The Emergence Of A Standards Market: Multiplicity Of Sustainability Standards In The Global Coffee Industry, Juliane Reinecke, Stephan Manning, Oliver Von Hagen

Stephan Manning

The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time, they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of ‘standards markets,’ this paper examines this tension and studies how different social movement and industry-driven standards organizations compete as well as collaborate over governance in transnational arenas. Based on an in-depth case study of sustainability standards in the global coffee industry, we find that the ongoing co-existence of multiple standards is being promoted by …