Topic: The Globalization of Corporate Environmental Transparency
Speaker: Professor Christopher Marquis
Harvard Business School
Time: 10:00-11:30am, Monday, July 26, 2010
Location: Room 217, New Building of GSM, Peking University.
Abstract:
Despite the increasing prevalence of corporate environmental disclosures, there remains substantial heterogeneity in the extent to which corporations reveal their environmental impacts. In this paper, we explore the sources of this heterogeneity by seeking to identify key country- and organization-level determinants of corporate environmental transparency. Our theoretical perspective is rooted in institutional theory, and we have three sets of predictions. First, drawing on global society research, we argue that an organizations’ global embeddedness will be associated with greater environmental transparency, and that this relationship is driven by: a) country membership in international governmental organizations (IGOs), b) the degree to which each country’s citizenry has access and exposure to the global society, and c) companies’ foreign exposure through stock market listing. Second, based on normative perspectives on legal environments and social movement traditions, we predict that stringency of national environmental laws as well as the laws protecting political and civil rights will also be associated with greater corporate environmental transparency. Finally, at the organization-level, we hypothesize that key organizational characteristics will allow corporations to either resist or be more likely to acquiesce to these institutional pressures. Notably, firms’ size and the amount of environmental damage they create will affect their strategic interests and visibility and as a result moderate corporate responsiveness to transparency pressures. We test our hypotheses using a novel panel dataset of 4628 large public companies in many industries headquartered in 44 countries, during 2005-2008. Controlling for a host of organizational, industry, and national characteristics, we find evidence for most of our hypothesized relationships. Contributions to understanding the decoupling of globalization processes and how organizations respond to institutional change are discussed.
Speaker’s Biographical Sketch:
Chris Marquis is an Associate Professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School.
His CV is at //www.people.hbs.edu/cmarquis/cv.pdf
