Exploring organizational, industry, and institutional determinants of environmental behavioran empirical multilevel study in the face of climate change

Résumé

Climate change increasingly jeopardizes our planets natural systems, posing a threat to the very foundations that sustain life on Earth. In response, extensive and unprecedented efforts have been made in recent years to mitigate these risks. However, reports from international organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Greenpeace suggest that these initiatives have not yet achieved the necessary efficacy to avert the potential collapse of critical ecological systems. As organizations are now perceived as both the primary cause of and potential solution to global warming, biodiversity loss, and resource overuse, this doctoral thesis presents three essays that illuminate the organizational, industry, and institutional factors influencing firms environmental behavior. The first essay explores the latitude managers have to proactively reduce the CO2 emissions of the companies they lead. The findings emphasize the need to overhaul current public policy baselines, which predominantly focus on environmental regulation and technological development, in order to establish a low-carbon future. This is crucial because the dissemination of proactive environmental practices appears to be, at the very least, equally important. The second essay investigates how specific industry dynamics create conditions that enable organizations to bypass the costs associated with environmental normative transgressions. This research refines our understanding of how social evaluations function, revealing that institutions, as social systems of control, may fall short of addressing Grand Challenges. The third essay seeks to comprehend the institutional factors contributing to existing cross-cultural variations in organizations environmental behaviors. By demonstrating that firms environmental behaviors are partially explained by countries agrarian origins, this work underscores the connection between organizations compliance with environmental-related societal expectations and historical factors.