Institutional pressures and organizational characteristics
Subtitle: implications for environmental strategy
By: Magali A. Delmas, Michael W. Toffel
Contributors: Toffel, Michael W.; Harvard Business School
Series: Working paper / Harvard Business School -- 11-050; Working paper (Harvard Business School) -- 11-050.
Publisher: Harvard Business School
Published: 2010
Place of publication: [Boston]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 28
Description: A broad literature has emerged over the past decades demonstrating that firms' environmental strategies and practices are influenced by stakeholders and institutional pressures. Such findings are consistent with institutional sociology, which emphasizes the importance of regulatory, normative and cognitive factors in shaping firms' decisions to adopt specific organizational practices, above and beyond their technical efficiency. Similarly, institutional theory emphasizes legitimation processes and the tendency for institutionalized organizational structures and procedures to be taken for granted, regardless of their efficiency implications. However, the institutional perspective does not address the fundamental issue of business strategy necessary to explain the persistence of substantially different strategies among firms that are subjected to comparable levels of institutional pressures. In this chapter, we present current research arguing that such firms adopt heterogeneous sets of environmental management practices despite facing common institutional pressures because organizational characteristics lead managers to interpret these pressures differently.
Notes: "November 2010"--Publisher's website.

"Prepared for the Oxford handbook of business and the environment (Oxford University Press, 2011), co-edited by Andrew J. Hoffman and Tima Bansal."--added t.p.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-26).