Environmental Intrapreneurship for Engaged Sustainability: Challenges and Pitfalls

What pathways do people take on the journey to stewardship and what rewards dothey reap? Numerous studies emphasize the underlying values, whether moral,spiritual, or religious, which provide the foundation for engaging in environmentalbehavior. Yet, many cases of stewardship are founded not on lofty environmentalideals but on pragmatic, localized ambitions. As cities work to rectifyhistorical inequities in access to environmental assets like trees and green spacesin low-income communities of color across the United States, it is important tounderstand the cultural and socioeconomic dimensions of environmental stewardshipand the distinct pathways to stewardship. Understanding these can lead topolicy and programmatic changes, helping city foresters and environmentaladvocacy groups better engage and serve marginalized communitie

Architectural Dimensions of Socially Driven Venture Capital Firms: Social Innovation in the Capital Markets

Purpose – Private equity and venture capital (VC) firms in the capital markets sector invest capital with the primary goal of delivering economic value. However, some firms in the capital markets sector have started to shift this focus to create (i.e. invest in) social value. More specifically, traditional VC firms are starting socially oriented funds, while other firms have emerged to focus solely on investments in social enterprises. These VC firms are contributing to an interesting paradox – performance metrics are not measured by profit alone but also by social innovation. From an architectural perspective, the authors examine the implications of internal design, i.e. how specific strategic and structural factors influence the financial performance of VC firms with a social orientation to determine if these firms really can “do well and do good.” Design/methodology/approach – Social orientation was determined by content analysis of mission statements of the VC firms. Firm strategies, structures and performance were sourced from secondary data. A moderated mediation model was used to test relationships. Findings – Results suggest that (1) socially responsible VC firms adopt distinct foci of social investing that directs their strategic orientation and (2) these various foci have vastly differing effects on the firm’s overall performance, strategic decisions made and the architecture of their structural design. Originality/value –This study is among the first to explore socially responsible VC architectural dimensions, with implications for firm design based on blended measures of success

Do Competitive Environments Lead to the Rise and Spread of Unethical Behavior? Parallels from Enron

While top-down descriptors have received much attention in explaining corruption, we develop a grassroots model to describe structural factors that may influence the emergence and spread of an individual’s (un)ethical behavior within organizations. We begin with a discussion of the economics justification of the benefits of competition, a rationale used by firms to adopt structural aides such as the ‹stacking’ practice that was implemented at Enron. We discuss and develop an individual-level theory of planned behavior, then extend it to the dyadic level in an internally competitive organization, and finally extend the dyadic model to the social network. We apply social network theory to predict favorable and unfavorable conditions for the emergence and diffusion of an intraorganizational instance of unethical behavior and find that network conditions favoring the suppression of the emergence of unethical behavior also promote its diffusion. For illustrative purposes, we utilize examples from Enron’s internally competitive structure to embed our arguments in a real world context and bring reality to our theorizing. Implications for both researchers and managers are discussed