Means versus ends in opaque institutional fields: Trading off compliance and achievement in sustainability standard adoption

__Abstract__ The long-standing discussion on decoupling has recently moved from adopters not implementing the agreed-upon policies to compliant adopters not achieving the goals intended by institutional entrepreneurs. This “means-ends decoupling” prevails especially in highly opaque fields, where practices, causality, and performance are hard to understand and chart. I conceptualize the conditions under which the adoption of institutions in relatively opaque fields leads to the achievement of the envisaged goals. Voluntary sustainability standards governing socioenvironmental issues illustrate these arguments. I argue that the lack of field transparency drives institutional entrepreneurs to create and maintain concrete and uniform rules, apply strong incentives, and disseminate “best practices” to ensure substantive adopter compliance. However, such rigid institutions are ill-equipped to deal with the causal complexity and practice multiplicity underlying opacity while they smother adopter agency. The ensuing tension between substantive compliance and goal achievement leads to an inherent trade-off: institutional entrepreneurs who remedy the policy-practice decoupling may enhance the disparity between means and ends, and vice versa. While sustainability standards and other institutions in highly opaque fields can, therefore, not fully achieve the envisaged goals, the trade-off can be reduced through systemically designed institutions that promote goal internalization and contain niche institutions

Costs, Methods, and Facilities in Packing South Carolina Peaches, 1959

Excerpt from the report Introduction: Considerable cost is incurred in harvesting and packing peaches for fresh market. With the increased emphasis being placed on marketing efficiency and efforts to reduce marketing costs, growers and packers of peaches should attempt to increase efficiencies in packinghouse operations. Observations indicate that seasonal output is the most important factor influencing total packing costs. However, in the short run, for a given operation the cost of labor appears to be the most important alterable cost in packing peaches for fresh market. A reduction in labor costs could increase returns to growers, reduce prices to consumers, or provide for additional services without additional cost. Any of these alternatives, in the long run, would tend to enhance the competitive position of the peach industry in South Carolina and the Southeast

CSR committees on boards: the impact of the external country level factors

This article explores the spread of corporate social responsibility (CSR) committees in the European countries, examining whether and what country level external conditions can have a positive impact for their presence on boards. CSR committees are becoming increasingly important as tools of corporate governance to fight corruption, protect stakeholders, create shared value in the long run and, in general, reduce company’s exposure to responsibility failures in a context where the management of CSR is even more complicated. Taking into consideration more than 22,000 boards of European companies from 2000 to 2016, we first developed a descriptive analysis on the level of spread of CSR committees, and then quantitatively prove that the non-financial disclosure mandatory requirements have a positive impact on the presence of CSR committees on boards. This study contributes to the prior studies about the extent to which CSR committees have been adopted by companies and to the existing literature about corporate governance and CSR, supports legislators and regulators by information about the more effective actions to encourage companies in CSR committees’ establishment, and suggests companies a special corporate governance structure to better manage their global responsibility towards stakeholders. Finally, this research can be the starting point for future studies about what industry level factors are potential driver for CSR committees on boards