Date of Award
8-2024
Document Type
Campus Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Business Administration
First Advisor
David L. Levy
Second Advisor
Ed Carberry
Third Advisor
Ruth V. Aguilera
Abstract
Sustainable investing has been increasingly studied by management scholars for its potential to transform organizational practices to realize broader collective goals such as gender equality and protecting and sustaining our global commons for the benefit of enhancing human flourishing across generations. While sustainable investing has recently blossomed worldwide, it has taken varied forms in different jurisdictions, reflecting persistent institutional path dependencies. This dissertation investigates dynamics that can promote or impede efforts to achieve collective goals such as gender equality and safeguarding our collective commons, emphasizing the role played by mechanisms of sustainable investment. The first study investigates how collective institutional entrepreneurship is affected by and can affect national institutional environments in promoting sustainable investing in the world's stock exchanges. The findings reveal an informativeness channel whereby jurisdictions initially resistant to promoting sustainability within stock exchanges embrace sustainable investing as a legitimate practice consistent with their overarching institutional environment. The second study elaborates on the distinctive characteristics of Scandinavian legal origins to propose a gendered theory of legal origins that better explains persistent cross-national differences in women's labor market outcomes. The findings of this study reveal more significant insights into the nuanced differences between families of legal origin that continue to reflect critical path dependencies that impact cross-national differences in economic outcomes and policy preferences. The third study uses a Weberian lens to address debates about means-ends and policy practice decoupling in socio environmental governance. A Weberian ethic of organizational responsibility is proposed that may mitigate both policy/practice and means/ends decoupling that has otherwise put into question the efficacy of sustainability standards and reporting to achieve an alignment between capital market imperatives and sustainability outcomes. Collectively, these manuscripts reveal important drivers and impediments in marshaling capital markets and corporate efforts to respond to humanity's most pressing collective concerns and have important implications for management theory and practice.
Recommended Citation
Loren, Steve Michael, "Navigating Institutional Dynamics for Sustainable Investment: Analyzing Entrepreneurial Efforts, National Path Dependencies, and Rationalization Processes" (2024). Graduate Doctoral Dissertations. 972.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/doctoral_dissertations/972
Comments
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