Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how Spanish local councils respond to changes in their institutional context by implementing a sustainable practice: Local Agenda 21 (LA21). Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the institutional approach to explain the factors influencing the adoption of LA21. It develops a series of hypotheses about how specific institutional factors affect the town and city councils that have implemented an LA21, as well as the differences between local councils with high versus medium implementation levels. Findings – The analysis reveals some institutional factors that explain the process of institutional change, the outcomes of LA21, and the differences between local councils. Research limitations/implications – Only one respondent from each local council completed the questionnaire. The authors tested for common method bias and did not find it to be present. Practical implications – From a more practical point-of-view, the authors consider LA21 to be an effective instrument for improving both the sustainability of towns and the management of local councils. Originality/value – The paper proposes institutional theory as a perspective that can explain change in organizations. The main value of the research lies in its identification of the factors affecting the process of change and the outcomes of implementing a sustainable practice like LA21.

It has recently been argued that CSR is ‘political’. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure favorable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and CPA that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm's CSR and CPA—alignment, misalignment and nonalignment—affects the firm's reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.

Firms typically present a mixed picture of corporate social performance (CSP), with positive and negative indicators exhibited by the same firm. Thus, stakeholders’ judgements of corporate social responsibility (CSR) typically evaluate positives in the context of negatives, and vice versa. Building on social judgement theory, we present two alternative accounts of how stakeholders respond to such complexity, which provide differing implications for the financial effects of CSP: reciprocal dampening and rewarding uniformity. Echoing notable findings on strategic consistency, our US panel study finds that firms that exhibit uniformly positive or uniformly negative indicators in particular dimensions of CSP outperform firms that exhibit a mixed picture of positives and negatives, which supports the notion that stakeholders’ judgements of CSR reward uniformity.

Publication date: December 2013
Source:Journal of Business Research, Volume 66, Issue 12

Author(s): Yan Yu , Xiao-Ying Dong , Kathy Ning Shen , Mohamed Khalifa , Jin-Xing Hao

Innovativeness is an important organizational capability for competitive advantage sustainability in the dynamic environment of Asia's emerging economies. Drawing upon dynamic capability theory, this study develops a research model of organizational innovativeness development for firms in emerging economies. The proactive strategic orientations reflected by entrepreneurship and technology oriented strategy provide important visions for organizational innovativeness. Further, the utilization of knowledge management systems and organizational learning are identified as intervention processes that translate these strategic orientations into real innovation capability. A survey involving 114 firms operating in China was conducted for hypothesis testing. The empirical results provide strong support and advance the knowledge of organizational innovativeness development for firms in Asia's emerging economies.