Corporate Sustainability and Green Innovation in an Emerging Economy—An Empirical Study in China

Abstract

Amid increased emphasis on sustainable development, understanding the sustainability initiative and practice of companies has attracted the attention of both academia and industry. Corporate sustainability combines triple values including environmental protection, social wellbeing, and economic benefit for companies. Drawing on institutional theory and employing an inductive case research method, we examine companies developing their green innovation and sustainability projects in a challenging context of China. Four representative case studies and in-depth interviews were conducted to examine how these firms overcome barriers in the less developed institutional environment. To better explain corporate sustainability with green innovations, a conceptual framework has been proposed to illustrate how firms operate in a network of relationship and cooperate with their external stakeholders. Firms' strategies to dynamically achieve the aim of corporate sustainability were identified based on a co-evolutional mechanism in the interface between institutions and organizations.

Family Control, Political Connection, and Corporate Green Governance

“…Moreover, with family control as the main explanatory variable and other control variables being consistent with the above, this paper explores the dynamic mechanism of family control on green governance. As shown in Table 7, the coefficient of family control is significantly positive in Column (13), indicating that family control can significantly improve corporate green governance when green governance is represented only by green governance effectiveness.…”

“…Column ( 14) adds the variable of political connection and the associations of family control × political to columns (13). We can find that family control, political, and the multiplier family control × political all have significant coefficients.…”

“…As the major consumer of natural resources and the major undertaker of ecological pollution, firms are on micro basis of realizing green GDP. The concept of corporate sustainability is also put forward to achieve stakeholder values, which implies the integration of conservation of nature and more efficient use of resources [13].…”

Understanding the Impact of Opinion Leaders’ Characteristics on Online Group Knowledge-Sharing Engagement from In-Group and Out-Group Perspectives: Evidence from a Chinese Online Knowledge-Sharing Community

“…In such online knowledge-sharing communities, community managers and users work toward a common goal: sustainable development [4]. Sustainable development means "meeting the online community development needs of present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs" [5].…”

“…With regard to the inter-relationships between opinion leaders, in-groups, and out-groups, a branch of studies has deemed opinion leaders to be major transfer nodes in the process of information dissemination: opinion leaders not only share information and knowledge with in-group members, but also may influence outside users [4]. However, although there are abundant works on the influence of opinion leaders on users within the same topic group, people still cannot find a clear link between opinion leaders and outside users beyond the group.…”