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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework which sheds new light on how sustainability control systems (SCS) can be used in proactive strategic responses to corporate sustainability pressures.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Corporate sustainability pressures are identified using insights from institutional theory and the resource-based view of the firm.

Findings – The paper presents an integrated framework showing the corporate sustainability pressures, proactive strategic responses to these pressures, and how organizations might use SCS in their responses to the corporate sustainability pressures they face.

Practical Implications – The proposed framework shows how organizations can use SCS in proactive strategic responses to corporate sustainability pressures.

Originality/Value – The paper suggests that instead of using traditional financial-oriented management control systems, organizations need more focus on emerging SCS as a means of achieving sustainability objectives. In particular, the paper proposes different SCS tools that can be used in proactive strategic responses to sustainability pressures in terms of (i) specifying and communicating sustainability objectives, (ii) monitoring sustainability performance, and (iii) providing motivation by linking sustainability rewards to performance.

In this chapter, we examine the interplay between external legitimacy judgments, internal identity beliefs, and conceptions of sustainability. Based on observation at industry events and interviews with key stakeholders, we examine how organizational actors interpret the concept of sustainability in civil aviation, an industry subject to intense legitimacy threat for its environmental impact. We find that the concept of sustainability is interpreted through a process of naturalization, by which conceptual ties to past practices are forged, and the concept becomes corrupted. We describe three mechanisms (relabeling, bundling, and zooming out) through which concept naturalization occurs, and we show how this process creates resonance between sustainability and an industry ethos, which captures the aspirations, ideals and values of the industry.

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of environmental reporting differences in the case of Romanian entities. In order to achieve this purpose, we analyze environmental reporting differences for Romanian listed companies using legitimacy theory as a theoretical background.

We conduct a quantitative research on the Romanian entities listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE).

The quality and quantity of environmental information reported by Romanian company still suffer from irrelevancy and incompleteness. The factors explaining the variation of environmental reporting in the case of Romanian listed companies are the export sales percentage, the BSE category, and size of the company, which demonstrate that larger companies tend to disclose more environmental information to respond to the pressure and to maintain their legitimacy.

The present study uses the content analysis as a research technique of 64 annual reports of Romania listed entities on the BSE. In this regard, a limitation of the study can be the sample size that can be extended and also the content analysis that can be considered subjective.

The chapter is of interest to anyone involved in the process of environmental disclosure, either as entity or other stakeholders.

The chapter supplements previous studies regarding environmental disclosure and the theories or factors that can explain environmental reporting differences.

This study illuminates how organizational actors use images in their struggle to define a contested industry. By leveraging social semiotics and visual rhetoric, we examine how multimodal texts (combining words and images) are used to label and reframe an industry using technical, environmental, human-rights, and preservation-of-life criteria. Building on theories of legitimation, we find that for this industry, contesting attempts at legitimacy work are escalated along a moral hierarchy. We offer an approach for examining how actors draw from broader meaning systems, use visual rhetoric in multimodal texts, and employ dual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation.

Purpose – This chapter investigates the role of enabling organizations in the processes whereby institutional investors collectively influence corporate managers on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues. We develop a framework combining stakeholder and collective action theory to explain how institutional investors influence corporations through collective engagement and to specify how enabling organizations influence this process.

Methodology/approach – To evaluate our framework, we investigate the role of the organizational platform provided by the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) initiative in supporting institutional investors’ collaborative engagement with corporations on ESG issues.

Findings – Our findings clarify how investors enhance their sources of power, legitimacy and urgency and attract managers’ attention through collaborative engagement, and show how they manage these attributes to reshape the legitimacy and urgency of their claims in the eyes of managers. Our results also show how enabling organizations such as the PRI initiative facilitate the emergence of collective action by lowering barriers to entry and providing a mobilizing structure, support collaborative efforts by adding their own legitimacy, normative power and persistence to the collaborative engagement, and create conditions for a lasting dialogue between investors and managers by providing a hybrid organizational space.

Social implications – In explaining how to enhance institutional investors’ collective action on ESG issues, this paper shows how we could reorient financial market forces toward sustainability.

Originality/value of paper – The paper benefited from a unique access to confidential and internal data from the UN-PRI initiative and provides a new framework.

The chapter explores how different theoretical traditions address the gaps between talk (symbolic communication practices) and actions (substantive performance) in organisations. The chapter details the main theoretical approaches in greenwashing research, namely legitimacy theory, attribution theory, institutional theory, signaling theory, impression management approaches and constructivist approaches. Among these latter, Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) challenges the dominant view in literature and suggests abandoning the traditional dichotomy of talk versus action. The different approaches to studying greenwashing are presented along with main questions and research methods used in each field and sub-field of study. For each theoretical approach the main research trends and novel research questions are proposed. Researchers, doctoral and post-graduate students may appreciate this as standalone contribution to guide their future studies in this area, by designing their research avenues based on the best practices in the field.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.

This paper analyzes a multidimensional model of organizational legitimacy, competencies, and resources in order to develop the linkage between institutional and resource-based perspectives by systematically detailing relationships among these factors and organizational viability. The underlying mechanisms of isomorphism and market partitioning serve as a point of departure by which the effects on organizational persistence of two sociocultural processes, cultural (constitutive) legitimation and sociopolitical (regulative) legitimation, are distinguished. Using data on 589 national self-help/mutual-aid organizations, this chapter explores how isomorphism and market partitioning foster legitimacy and promote organizational viability. Results show that the more differentiated an organization’s core competencies and resources, the greater the sociopolitical legitimacy; the more isomorphic an organization’s competencies and resources, the greater the cultural legitimacy. The latter isomorphic processes, however, do not promote greater organizational viability. In fact, while isomorphism legitimates with respect to cultural recognition, it is heterogeneity, not homogeneity, that promotes organizational survival.

We empirically examine the institutional dynamics attending the process whereby legitimate organizational symbols become illegitimate. We conducted two studies, one historical and one comparative, of those firms that appended “dot-com” to their names during the period of “Internet euphoria,” 1998–1999. The first study analyzes the legitimacy over time for one case, that of Egghead software, the first organization to affix “dot-com” to its name. The second study compares the legitimacy of firms named “dot-com” in the wake of the “dot-com” crash, using both public perceptions and financial valuations. Results from the two studies indicate that good organization names can go bad rather quickly and illustrate how swift and definitive the process of deinstitutionalization can be.

We view emerging-market multinational corporations (EMNCs) as agents for global isomorphism. EMNCs seek to enter developed markets not only to expand their business operations but also to acquire advanced knowledge to enhance their core competencies. In entering these markets, EMNCs are subject to coercive, normative and cognitive pressures as they seek legitimacy. Once these firms gain legitimacy in advanced markets through the adoption of local business practices, they transfer these approaches to their headquarters in developing markets, establishing best practices in their home markets. Further, EMNCs may engage in efforts aimed at changing the institutional environment in the developing market to facilitate the transfer of learned practices from the developed market. Thus, we propose that these best practices lead to global isomorphism, but also note instances where symbolic adoption of developed market practices may slow the isomorphic process.