Transitioning toward Sustainability: How Corporate Sustainability Strategies Affect Stakeholders’ Actions

Abstract

Organizations face increasing opportunities and challenges as societies and economies transition toward sustainability. Despite growing scholarly attention devoted to understanding how interactions between organizations and diverse groups of stakeholders affect those opportunities and challenges, a number of important questions remain as to how corporate sustainability strategies affect stakeholders’ actions. For instance, how is corporate adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices perceived and evaluated by stakeholders? And how does public criticism of ESG issues targeted at firms or their peers affect how investors evaluate those firms as well as the heterogeneity in firms’ sustainability practices over time? This dissertation thus recognizes how corporate ESG strategies and communications are multi-directional, originating both inside the firms in attempts to influence external audiences’ evaluations as well as outside those firms in attempts to influence firms’ strategies. Moreover, the impacts of corporate sustainability strategies on stakeholders’ actions are multi-level in nature, ranging from industry-level (Chapter 2), organization-level (Chapter 3), and individual-level (Chapter 4). The findings from the three essays which comprise this dissertation highlight important unintended consequences as organizations transition toward sustainability and inform organizations as to how to more effectively engage in and communicate ESG practices, while contributing new theoretical insights into sustainability research.