Anne Jacqueminet Grant Award

Despite the mounting pressure for organizations to reduce their negative social and environmental (S&E) footprint, results are still disappointing. Important changes in the processes and products are needed to effectively reach S&E results, together with economic sustainability. However, as profit-seeking and S&E aspects involve desirable yet conflicting objectives, multiple tensions emerge when aiming to address both. Confronted with such tensions, some firms change and find successful ways to integrate S&E concerns in their activities, while others still perpetuate wrongdoing, giving priority to the profit-seeking goals.

We aim to investigate “What factors make organizations effectively address the tensions between profit-seeking and S&E goals? And what factors prevent them to do so?”. In particular, we aim at understanding the role of organizations' willingness and ability.

To achieve those goals, we propose a tailored approach, detailing the RQ in three sub-RQs, focusing on:
 

• Tensions emerging in developing new products – performing an innovative, longitudinal, analysis on a newly-developed database of patents in the context of the chemical industry, which allows verifying the role of willingness and ability (W&A) in driving some companies to address tensions and effectively implement greener products while others keep pursuing toxic chemicals.
• Tensions emerging in developing more eco-friendly processes – creating a novel database including longitudinal, firm-level pollution levels on the leather production – and verifying to what extent W&A allow distinguishing firms that face sustainability tensions by introducing production processes that are effectively reducing environmental impacts from those that keep prioritizing the economic goals.
• Tensions across different actors along the value chains. In particular, we will perform a longitudinal, in-depth case analysis of an organization whose business model is aimed at supporting and spreading S&E positive impact along its whole value chain. We aim at understanding how their different W&A allow different actors to deal with tensions in an array of ways along the value chain.