Jonatan Pinkse

King's College London | KCL · King's Business School

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...

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...

Transition pathways for net zero encompass seemingly insurmoun-table innovation challenges for the scaling of less mature technological solutions such as hydrogen, materials substitution, and electrification as well as societal challenges to increase the market acceptability of these solutions. In this article, we present a conceptual framework whi...

The complexity and uncertainty of climate change pose unique challenges to the development of corporate adaptation strategies. Climate adaptation requires organizations to rely on sensemaking to understand climate events, implications for their operations, and develop a response. Organizational heuristics can support sensemaking by simplifying deci...

This study empirically analyzes factors related to companies’ profits from trading emission allowances in the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) for the period from 2005 to 2017 by combining information on trading activities with company characteristics of more than 6,000 companies. The factors considered include net position (i.e., f...

In this paper we enrich the concept of place-based leadership. Building on social movement theory, our analysis of the clean growth mission development in Greater Manchester (UK) reveals the role of place-based leadership in mobilising and coordinating framing processes that linked the global climate change problem with local challenges, articulate...

This paper provides a firm-level perspective on sustainability transitions by analysing how government can use transition policy mixes to entice industry incumbents to adapt their business model to integrate sustainable technologies. It examines firm-level barriers to policy implementation, why these exist, and how government can use transition pol...

How do platforms integrate governance mechanisms that promote inherently distinct rules and incentives to manage peer relationships? Digital platforms combine market and community-based mechanisms to govern peer-to-peer interactions for value creation. However, these governance mechanisms play unique roles and interact in distinctive ways, thus sha...

In recent years, research on government policies in sustainability transition studies has proliferated, largely focusing on their role to drive transformational change through technological innovation. This strand of research faces two main challenges. First, the research has remained largely fragmented due to the breadth of concepts it encompasses...

This article develops the argument that the interplay between emotions and cognitive biases influences corporate decision-making on climate change adaptation. Our theoretical analysis examines how emotions can change the effect of cognitive biases on adaptation decisions by influencing how firms select, access, and process complex and uncertain cli...

Research on how cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) contribute toward addressing societal grand challenges (SGCs) has burgeoned, yet studies differ significantly in what scholars analyze and how. These differences matter as they influence the reported results. In the absence of a comprehensive framework to expose the analytical choices behind each stu...

Energy utilities play an important role in transitioning to a sustainable energy industry. Data on 8967 transactions by 19 European energy utilities from 1990 to 2019 illustrate when and how utilities invest in sustainable resources and divest traditional resources such as fossil-fuel plants. Utilities transitioning to sustainable energy have great...

This report captures context, analysis and insights following research into the productivity challenges of constructing new homes in the UK, and particularly with respect to Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) that produce 3D/volumetric model homes. Government targets of 300,000 new homes annually are far out of reach for traditional builders and...

In paradoxical situations, organizational actors face various demands that are contradictory and interdependent at the same time. While the current literature focuses on how organizational actors respond to these paradoxical demands, it does so in a depersonalized manner with little attention to the stakeholders behind these demands. Therefore, it...

One of the most investigated research topics in the corporate sustainability literature is "the" business case. Long lionized for linking the profit motive to corporate environmental initiatives, the business case for sustainability is now vehemently criticized. These critics generally argue for a return to the state and stronger regulatory framewo...

Business models for sustainability (BMfS) enable organizations to create social and environmental value for a wide variety of stakeholders. As BMfS are new for well-established industries, their implementation requires deep organizational change to overcome path dependencies of existing business models. In this article, we present a framework which...

Biodiversity conservation is a cross-cutting theme across all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Businesses can significantly augment global efforts to conserve biodiversity and abate biodiversity loss. Through targeted policy instruments, G20 countries can catalyse business engagement in biodiversity conservation and al...

Deforestation is a complex environmental problem that has eluded a series of public policies and private sector interventions. The need to develop effective solutions to this problem is urgent because unabated deforestation exacerbates climate change, biodiversity loss, human rights violations, displacement of Indigenous communities, and breakouts...

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...

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...

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

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 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...