Three essays on the role of organizations and communities in promoting social and environmental change

Resumen

This dissertation explores the firm and community-level factors that enable organizations to effectively solve social and environmental problems. This exploration is based on the notion that enduring social problems are complex endeavors with ambiguous solutions. As such, tackling these issues requires the involvement of multiple actors with often conflicting goals and orientations. In the first study, I introduce the notion of dialogue between firms and external actors as a way to reach feasible solutions on social/environmental matters. Relying on the context of shareholder activism, I further examine what factors influence dialogue in the first place. Dominant perspectives such as social movement studies have mostly relied on power and reputational threats as mechanisms for explaining firms’ concessions to outside actors. This first study does not disregard these forces as enablers of dialogue, but offers a more comprehensive picture by including other factors such as CEO values, board/CEO temporal orientation and managerial experience. These factors increase dialogue to a larger extent than power and reputational threats. Building on the insights of the first study, the dissertation then shifts the analysis toward community-level factors that enable organizations to produce change towards sustainability. The second paper studies how local institutional actors influence the effectiveness of environmental nonprofits in improving the community’s environmental performance. The study offers a novel perspective regarding how peripheral actors with an aligned institutional logic such as welfare nonprofits enhance the value-creating effectiveness of environmentalists, while core actors such as governments may, under certain circumstances, decrease it. Finally, the third paper adds a layer of complexity by studying not only the institutional but also the competitive forces that shape the effectiveness of welfare nonprofits in reducing income inequality. Taken together, the three studies offer a multi-level perspective on factors that influence organizational effectiveness in dealing with complex social and environmental problems.