Jonatan Pinkse

The University of Manchester · Manchester Institute of Innovation Research

Corporate sustainability confronts managers with complex issues and tensions between economic, environmental and social aspects. Drawing on the literature on managerial cognition, corporate sustainability, and strategic paradoxes, we develop a cognitive framing perspective on corporate sustainability. We propose two cognitive frames – a business ca...

A flourishing literature assesses how sustainable business models create and capture value in socio-ecological systems. Nevertheless, we still know relatively little about how the organization of sustainable business models – of which cross-sector partnerships represent a core and distinctive mechanism – can support socio-ecological resilience. We...

This conceptual paper argues that for sustainable product innovation to make a contribution to addressing sustainability issues, we need to understand not only why consumers adopt sustainable products but also what makes them use these in a sustainable way. To explain how specific product features can change the ways in which consumers engage with...

Digital technologies contribute to more sustainable development – but also create unintended consequences. This was an underlying theme throughout all papers in our special issue “Sustainability in the Digital Age”, edited by Christina Bidmon, Jonatan Pinkse and myself. Whether it is social media sharing, using big data, or IoT technologies for sus...

Addressing global sustainability challenges requires a mainstreaming of business models for sustainability (BMfS) in mature industries. However, the presence of an already dominant mainstream business model in an industry tends to hold back BMfS. This article investigates how new types of BMfS can become generally accepted and widely adopted in an...

A move towards the business model of product-service systems (PSS) holds the promise of changing customer behaviour in a more sustainable direction. While this promise of PSS to play a key role in business sustainability has long been recognised, so far, the realised sustainability benefits remain limited. This article sheds light on the reasons wh...

The purpose of this article is to stimulate research on business strategies for biodiversity protection. To that end, we first dispel a common misperception among business scholars that biodiversity loss is caused by only a few industries, clarifying that it is driven by practically all. Further, we organize corporate biodiversity protection strate...

This chapter explores whether and how an important environmental issue such as climate change can not only give multinational enterprises the opportunity to develop “green” firm-specific advantages (FSAs), but also help reconfigure key FSAs that are viewed as the main sources of firms’ profitability, growth, and survival. We examine the nature and...

This article makes two contributions to the COVID-related green recovery literature, which is dominated by optimistic and speculative opportunity narratives. Mobilising insights from political science theories, our conceptual contribution is to suggest that green recovery analyses should focus not only on the opportunities (‘permissive conditions’)...

Supply-chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are of unparalleled magnitude because of a confluence of circumstances: a sudden rise in demand for some products, unforeseen shifts in demand points, supply shortages, a logistical crisis, and an unprecedentedly quick recovery in major economies. This article maps the changes that will occur...

Delivering a low-carbon future depends significantly on the decarbonization of the electricity industry. Increasingly, electric utilities have experienced pressure to redefine their business model amid the need to transition to a sustainable energy system. In this study, we focus on how utilities have changed their business model to adapt to the em...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to extend existing knowledge in corporate sustainability (CS) and digitalization literature. Innovation strategies (namely, exploration, exploitation and ambidexterity) are used to identify an innovative employee domain that influences a firm’s non-financial performance. Digital reputation – i.e. the set of stak...

This chapter takes stock of recent empirical work on paradoxical tensions in business sustainability. It investigates how people perceive of such tensions, what responses they envisage, and how they manage them. More specifically, this chapter reviews empirical papers that focus on the identification of paradoxical tensions; response strategies to...

Call for Papers for Special issue of Business Strategy and the Environment on "Deforestation, global value-chains, and corporate sustainability"

The sharing economy represents a form of governance that combines practices which facilitate social bonds and economic transactions. Based on the understanding that enabling desired socio-economic relations between individuals forms the core of the governance of sharing activities, this paper develops a conceptual framework which shows how governan...

The future of value-chains in a post pandemic world- Call for Papers

This paper investigates how social enterprises construct accounts to gain legitimacy from the social impact generated by their products and operations. The paper finds that social impact accounts are framed to appeal to two distinct forms of judgment about legitimacy: cognitive and evaluative. Cognitive forms of judgment qualify how well an enterpr...

Given that entire industries face sustainability challenges, it is important to understand the dynamics that lead “firms‐in‐an‐industry” to engage in sustainable product innovation. To provide more insight into the question of how innovation activities spread from individual firm action to an industry‐wide engagement, this paper examines the automo...

This chapter focuses on the role of firms’ process of strategizing in relation to the political dimension of sustainable innovation. Basing itself in management literature that takes a strategic perspective to corporate sustainability, it analyses firms’ capabilities in lobbying governments to either push or impede the development and commercializa...

Companies producing and marketing processed high-fat-high-sugar food and drinks face a strategic tension between their core business and the social issue of obesity. For these companies, the social issue of obesity constitutes a strategic social-business tension. We conduct a qualitative study of the print media coverage on the public debate around...

This article explores the phenomenon that corporations’ commercial-logic business models increasingly embed responsibility-logic patterns: The proverbial leopards’ spots. We have conducted a thematic analysis of responsibility patterns in annual report business model descriptions (artefacts) and a qualitative comparative analysis of corporations’ s...

Although firms widely use product preannouncements as a signaling strategy to influence external audiences' perceptions and decisions, environmental scholars have rarely investigated this medium as a legitimation strategy. This study explores the impact of environmental performance on firms' propensity to use symbolic green new product preannouncem...

To tackle sustainability, firms often use partnerships with organizations from different industries or societal sectors such as government and civil society. While partnerships show potential for firms to improve their sustainability performance, they not only lead to a potential to learn from diversity, but also to tensions due to a lack of unity...

Over the past two decades, clusters have become a popular policy tool to increase the competitiveness of regions and to stimulate job creation. The underlying assumption of cluster policy is that the government can either facilitate the development of a cluster or create one ‘from scratch’. So far, limited attention has been given to how the member...

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a paradox perspective on corporate sustainability. By explicitly acknowledging tensions between different desirable, yet interdependent and conflicting sustainability objectives, a paradox perspective enables decision-makers to achieve competing sustainability objectives simultaneously and creates leew...

Clusters face what has been referred to as a 'cluster paradox'; a situation in which a collective identity breeds cohesion and efficiency in inter-organisational collaboration, yet it hinders the variety needed to adapt to disruptive change and prevent lock-in situations. Accordingly, a recurring theme in the literature on cluster evolution and clu...

Until recently, it was commonly assumed that social enterprises – by virtue of the ingenuity of their founders – were extra-ordinarily capable to simultaneously pursue social and financial goals. However, an emerging body of literature considers that social enterprises face tensions and trade-offs as they pursue their divergent goals. While extant...

The business case for social responsibility (BCSR) is one of the most widely studied topics in the business and society literature that focuses on large firms. This attention is understandable because large firms have an obligation to shareholders who, as commonly assumed, seek to maximize returns on their investments, in turn, pressing corporate m...

In this article, we take stock of the ambivalent and contested nature of the sharing economy. Considering the ‘sharing economy’ as an umbrella construct and an essentially contested concept, we position the sharing economy as resting on three foundational cores: (1) Access economy, (2) Platform economy, and (3) Community-based economy. We show how...

To fulfill external accountability expectations social impact measurement has become an important practice for social enterprises. Yet, the ambiguity around social impact and its measurement leads to a friction among stakeholders involved in a social enterprise. Based on interviews with small-to-medium-sized social enterprises, this paper investiga...

Drawing on and extending institutional logics and resource dependence theories, this paper posits that for cross-sector partnerships to survive, organizations need to share compatible institutional logics, but depend less on each other’s resources. Asymmetrical cross-sector partnerships may lead to a breakup if organizations are forced to operate u...

Despite increasing pressure to address climate change, firms have been slow to respond with effective action. This paper derives a multi-level framework for a better understanding of why many firms are failing to reduce their absolute greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change. To explain the phenomenon of organizational inaction...

Disruptive technologies tend to underperform on attributes that are considered as key attributes of incumbent technologies and require new value propositions to increase mainstream customer appeal. Yet, how do firms reconfigure their value proposition as a way to overcome the technological inferiority of disruptive technologies? This paper conceptu...

This study takes an institutional perspective on industry creation, which argues that an industry’s maturation relies on a process of building legitimacy and establishing rules for competition. It addresses the institutional evolution process that an industry experiences, in which existing rules for competition are disrupted and replaced by new reg...

Although firms widely use product preannouncements as a signaling strategy to influence the target audiences’ perceptions and decisions, environmental management scholars have rarely investigated this medium as a legitimation strategy. This study explores the propensity of firms to issue symbolic green product preannouncements. Building on a sample...

Based on a study of the oil and gas industry, this article examines how physical impacts of climate change become events that firms notice and interpret in a way that leads to an active response to adapt to these impacts. Theoretically, the study draws on the attention-based view to highlight the potential biases that might occur as a consequence o...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature holds that CSR can help firms gain a competitive advantage by enabling them to differentiate themselves from their competition and reduce costs. In the strategy literature, differentiation and cost reduction are recognized as two major competitive strategies that firms pursue to outcompete rival firm...

The literature on corporate social performance (CSP) advocates that firms address social issues based on instrumental as well as moral rationales. While both rationales trigger initiatives to increase CSP, these rest on fundamentally different and contradicting foundations. Building on the literature on organizational ambidexterity and paradox in m...

Smart grids could revolutionize the electricity sector when they stimulate customer empowerment and allow new players such as ICT firms to participate. A key question is whether electricity firms would either benefit or lose from smart grid deployment, because their established business model might be at risk. This paper seeks to explain under whic...

Low-emission vehicle (LEV) technologies have grown in the 1990s, but have since experienced fluctuating interest. Initially, electric vehicles (EVs) were the most promising technology. Most large car firms developed EVs and started bringing them to the market, in limited numbers. Yet, car firms halted their EV engagement around 2001 and focused on...

How firms behave under conditions of decline and resource constraints has not been considered in the corporate sustainability literature. This leaves unanswered the question how much we should rely on firms’ sustainabilityoriented voluntary initiatives at a time when the global economy continues to be weak and firms face persistent threats of decli...

While sustainable entrepreneurs face market barriers that require them to become politically active, how to accomplish this has not yet been explored. This paper seeks to address this research gap based on an exploratory study of the Dutch clean energy sector. Findings suggest that sustainable entrepreneurs are politically active, but pursue these...

This paper proposes a systematic framework for the analysis of tensions in corporate sustainability. The framework is based on the emerging integrative view on corporate sustainability, which stresses the need for a simultaneous integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions without, a priori, emphasising one over any other. The integ...

Over the past decades, the influence of corporations in global environmental politics has increased substantially. In their political involvement, corporations have moved towards a proactive mode, taking up a public role through activities that used to be the exclusive domain of governments. In the academic literature, this changing political role...

While business tends to be seen a substantial factor in causing climate change, climateinduced physical changes can also pose major challenges to firms in return. Firms can reduce their vulnerability to these changes by defining and implementing an adaptation strategy. Based on an empirical analysis of the oil and gas industry, this paper examines...

This Summer’s edition of the Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM) Energy Market Barometer documents the French energy experts’ expectations of the impact of the Ukraine crisis on energy supply, the focus of energy policy in France, the economic implications of the energy transition, and the development of energy prices. The findings on the Ukraine cr...

We analyze the suitability of cross-sector partnerships as an effective mechanism for private environmental governance. By focusing on the interaction between firms within cross-sector partnerships, we analyze how competition between firms affects partnership effectiveness. Marrying insights from the private governance literature with institutional...

Sustainable technologies challenge prevailing business practices, especially in industries that depend heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Firms are therefore in need of business models that transform the specific characteristics of sustainable technologies into new ways to create economic value and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of th...

In the automotive industry the need to move towards more sustainable trajectories of innovation has received much attention. Car manufacturers have started to develop loweremission alternatives for the internal combustion engine, particularly electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles. They face the challenge, however, of how to make a potentially dis...

This new initiative aims to track the key trends and challenges of the energy market, on a regular basis, in collaboration with the ‘ZEW’, the Center for European Economic Research. The ZEW has launched a similar barometer in Germany since 2003. This edition analyses the expectations of the energy market experts on the role of shale gas, the future...

While business tends to be seen a substantial factor in causing climate change, climate-induced physical changes can also pose major challenges to firms in return. This paper examines how the way firms make sense of climate stimuli in terms of awareness and vulnerability informs strategic measures to adapt and become more resilient to climate-induc...

In recent years, many firms have decided to adhere to a specific carbon norm, such as carbon neutrality or carbon labels, to show their commitment to climate change mitigation. Nevertheless, it is still unclear what it means when a firm sets a specific carbon norm. This article reviews the various kinds of carbon norms that have emerged and asks wh...

Environmental management in an international setting refers to the way in which multinational enterprises (MNEs) manage local and global environmental issues, such as the release of toxic substances, biodiversity, ozone depletion, and climate change. With regard to environmental management, MNEs face the strategic challenge of whether to adopt a si...

This paper explores how climate change affects multinational enterprises (MNEs), focusing on the challenges they face in overcoming liabilities and filling institutional voids related to the issue. Climate change is characterized by institutional failures, because there is neither an enforceable global agreement nor a market morality. Climate chang...

In diversifying energy supply, the transformation of the energy industry has been identified as a key challenge for a sustainable energy future. This suggests that incumbent firms in this industry have a vital role in the development and commercialization process of renewable energy technologies. This paper provides a comparative analysis of oil an...

While calls are being made to deal with the linkages between climate change and sustainable development to arrive at an integrated policy, concrete steps in this direction have been very limited so far. One of the possible instruments through which both issues may be approached simultaneously is a multistakeholder partnership, a form of governance...

For today’s manager, sustainability is not just another business issue. Perpetual pressure from corporate stakeholders to incorporate sustainability has created pervasive changes to what is becoming an increasingly complex and challenging decision context for organizational decision makers. Managing sustainability requires fundamentally new skills...

For today's manager, sustainability is not just another business issue. Perpetual pressure from corporate stakeholders to incorporate sustainability has created pervasive changes to what is becoming an increasingly complex and challenging decision context for organizational decision makers. Managing sustainability requires fundamentally new skills...

This paper focuses on MNEs’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, which previous studies have found to exhibit strong country-of-origin effects. It examines whether MNEs’ adherence to global standards (as adopted by e.g. ILO, OECD, UN, ISO) is associated with smaller cross-country differences and less country-of-origin effects in CSR rep...

This paper focuses on MNEs’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, which previous studies have found to exhibit strong country-of-origin effects. It examines whether MNEs’ adherence to global standards (as adopted by e.g. ILO, OECD, UN, ISO) is associated with smaller cross-country differences and less country-of-origin effects in CSR rep...

Climate change is often perceived as the most pressing environmental problem of our time, as reflected in the large public, policy, and corporate attention it has received, and the concerns expressed about the (potential) consequences. Particularly due to temperature increases, climate change affects physical and biological systems by changing ecos...

This introduction presents a framework managers can use to deal with regulatory uncertainty and also introduces and summarizes how the papers in this special issue address what managers can expect, do, and gain from regulatory uncertainty.

The international debate on addressing global climate change increasingly points to the role that companies can play by using their innovative capacity. However, up till now companies have been rather cautious in taking decisive steps in facilitating an innovation-based transition towards a low-carbon economy. This paper conceptually explores some...

The mainstream of the literature on corporate sustainability follows the win–win paradigm, according to which economic, environmental and social sustainability aspects can be achieved simultaneously; indeed, corporate sustainability has often been defined by the intersection of these three areas. However, given the multi-faceted and complex nature...

Many companies, policymakers and other stakeholders see climate change as the most pressing environmental problem of our time. In bailout plans and policies to address the economic recession and credit crisis, climate aspects haves figured prominently as well. This article examines recent policy and economic developments and their relevance for bus...

This position paper provides an initial overview of the role of tripartite partnerships for climate change in the broader framework of policy options available to address the issue. First, we will position partnerships in relation to other policy modes for climate change, including emissions trading schemes, voluntary agreements and individual corp...

This chapter relates to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)-funded research project `“Getting down to business“: Economic responses to climate change', which involved the first two authors.<SUP>1</SUP> It studied the (potential) contribution of business to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and how the realities of bus...

The construction industry has great opportunities to significantly reduce CO2 emissions by improving the energy efficiency of residential buildings. However, in this industry, diffusion of cost-effective clean technologies has been notoriously slow and below potential. This paper sheds light on factors that explain why construction companies have b...

This paper sheds light on factors influencing to what extent MNCs are able to implement a global environmental strategy. We apply the concept of absorptive capacity to analyze what role the uptake and integration of external knowledge plays in implementing an environmental strategy and propose to make a distinction between shared and unit-specific...

Climate change is seen as the most pressing environmental problem of our time by many companies, policymakers and other stakeholders. It is currently also at the forefront of attention in view of attempts to conclude a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. In bail-out plans and policies to address the economic recession and credit c...

In recent years, not only has attention to corporate governance increased but also the notion has broadened considerably, and started to cover some aspects traditionally seen as being part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR, corporate governance and their interlink seem particularly relevant for multinational enterprises (MNEs), which, d...

This paper explores whether and how an important environmental issue such as climate change can not only give multinational enterprises the opportunity to develop “green” firm-specific advantages (FSAs), but also help reconfigure key FSAs that are viewed as the main sources of firms' profitability, growth, and survival. We examine the nature and ge...