We investigate the classic management debate of agency versus institutional pressures through the application of the varieties of capitalism literature. In particular, we examine corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and their relationships with firm performance in two types of capitalist systems: coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs). We note that while the CSR literature has tended to develop a balanced view on the influence of agency and institutional pressures, the CSiR literature has tended to emphasize the influence of agency. The latter appears to be a result of the fundamental attribution bias, where irresponsible corporate behaviours are attributed to individual managers or organizations, rather than the institutional environment. Our results, which include five years of data across 16 countries, show significantly greater CSR and significantly lower CSiR in CMEs compared with LMEs. Further, we find a positive relationship between CSR and firm performance in CMEs but not LMEs, and a negative relationship between CSiR and firm performance in LMEs but not CMEs. Overall, our results demonstrate the influence of the institutional environment, suggesting that corporate behaviours mirror the external environment.

Publication date: January 2018
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 126

Author(s): Maria de Fátima Teles, Jorge Freire de Sousa

This article is about making decisions concerning the management of sustainability, decisions that may influence the use or protection of natural resources or address difficult societal choices. Managers have more and more to tackle a diversity of problems in a rigorous and transparent way. One of the distinctive features of these decisions is that managers must give attention to both the values of people affected and factual information concerning the potential consequences of actions. This imposes the adoption of new methods for structuring spaces, strategy alternatives, and organizational planning. The support from operational research analysts becomes increasingly important, as we are dealing with people mostly without strong quantitative or model-building backgrounds. With the presence of different perspectives and mental models, behavior elements are at the core of the problem and unintentional biases in model use may occur. Our intention is to help promote the transference of knowledge to and within companies so that they may assure resilience. We found in general morphological analysis a great help for that. We want to make available a meta-model based on Operational Research for fields involving public resources and multiple interests to aid current and future managers of companies. We conclude the article with two case studies to illustrate our approach.

Publication date: February 2018
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 127

Author(s): Pasquale Marcello Falcone, Piergiuseppe Morone, Edgardo Sica

By examining the use of language and depicting the emerging storylines surrounding the green finance (GF) niche, this study aims to identify actors pushing the Italian financial sector to become increasingly greener. Then, it scrutinizes the narratives used by landscape actors to assess the channels through which such pressure is exerted, as well as its effectiveness. Our findings reveal a high/unbalanced narrative pressure coming from global actors by means of both institutional and informal channels, and from national actors mainly by means of informal channels. If no apposite policy interventions are undertaken, such inadequacy could jeopardize the development of green innovations. More specifically, this study could support decision makers in developing specific strategies to unlock the huge potential of GF in the transition process towards a greener economy by: (i) supporting a deeper strategic collaboration among informal and institutional actors operating at the national level; (ii) acting as catalysts of green-oriented financial initiatives and related dissemination, and (iii) re-addressing the national-institutional actors towards a more proactive role in fostering finance for green innovation.

Publication date: January 2018
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 126

Author(s): Wim Zeiler

As the effects of damage to our environment become all the more clear, there is an ongoing social transformation towards sustainability which will affect technology development and make forecasting more difficult. This calls for a holistic integrated design approach which, already at the initial conceptual design phase, requires the involvement of various design experts from different domains to form multidisciplinary design teams. In order to support these teams, a design method based on the use of morphological charts and a morphological overview was developed in cooperation with the Dutch professional organizations of architects and consulting engineers. This tool aids architects and engineers with their new role in the conceptual design phase, as it enables effective exchange of each discipline's perspective on the design task as well as structuring available domain knowledge. The method has been applied in the Master Program project “Integral Design”, at the Faculty of the Built Environment of the Technical University Eindhoven. The design support tool is part of a multidisciplinary program in which students work together with experienced professionals. The outcome shows that the design support tool facilitates a significant increase in the number of possible solutions generated by design teams, and it demonstrates that the morphological charts and morphological overview can be used as an analysis tool for evaluating the impact of different interventions during the conceptual phase of the building design process. This paper provides both a detailed discussion of the design support tool itself, and how the tool was utilized to determine the effectiveness of individual designers. The impact of various interventions is investigated, such as that of adding an experienced professional to a student's design team and the use of C-constructs based on the Concept-Knowledge theory of Hatchel and Weil, in order to further stimulate the generation of sub-solutions.