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What is the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP)? This study proposes that risk is an intermediary between the two and uses bond market data to test the relationship. Mediated regression shows the Moody's risk rating does fully mediate the relationship between KLD and YTM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on responsible investing (RI) has focused on how the choices, motivations, and behaviors of retail investors influence RI adoption. However, financial advisors also play a critical role intermediating RI acceptance among their clients. In this study we draw on work identification theory to explain how the values and motivations of RI advisors influence how and whether advisors effectively engage their clients with RI products and services. Our qualitative study found that work identification in RI advisors resulted in a higher willingness to invest time and energy, an orientation to develop values-based relationships with clients and a heightened commitment towards RI; each of these positively influenced the professional outcomes of acquiring more RI clients and gaining acceptance for RI among clients. In contrast, the RI advisors who lacked this identification struggled to find acceptance for RI among their clientele. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to a better understanding of how firms pursue optimal distinctiveness by strategically balancing conformity and differentiation. Leveraging interviews with 30 clean technology entrepreneurs in Canada, we sought to explain how firms successfully commercialize their technologies under various conditions. To do so, we advance the notion of a legitimacy threshold that firms must meet in order to successfully engage in strategic differentiation. We explain how this threshold is influenced by conditions both internal and external to the firm. Firms draw on entrepreneurial experience, collaborative strategies, and consistency framing to mitigate the presence of incumbent dependency, technology radicalness, and problematizing framing. We identified four pathways through which new entrants achieved commercialization success - two of which emphasize differentiation and two of which emphasize conformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communities face the prospect of more extreme, frequent and damaging natural disasters and possible resilience failures. Firms are instrumental to the resilience of communities as they play a central role in supporting communities impacted by natural disasters delivering essential products and services during a natural disaster, and supplying inputs crucial for disaster recovery. However, there is a gap between the public policy literature that focuses on community-level resilience, and disaster-oriented management research that focuses on firm-centric reactions to natural disasters. In this paper, we argue that research is needed to understand the contributions that firms make to community resilience. The research presented here draws on a novel data set of 2,100 corporate press releases directly tied to the occurrence of 310 natural disasters over the 10 years following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Findings show: (1) the variety of firm responses to natural disasters, (2) the tendency of firms from the same sectors to adopt similar disaster responses, (3) the importance of the disaster type which drives responses, (4) the influence of the certainty yet unpredictability of disasters, and (5) the of role of geography. The paper concludes by offering suggestions for the future study of the intersection between firms, natural disasters, and community resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I adopt a configurational approach toward understanding the relationship between different types of environmental dynamism and the characteristics of associated dynamic capabilities. I build a typology of environmental dynamism that encompasses environmental stability, ongoing environmental change, environmental shifts, and persistent disturbances. From this typology, I articulate a configurational relationship between these types of environmental dynamism and the nature of dynamic capabilities firms build in each case. This configurational approach permits a reinterpretation of our understanding of dynamic capabilities in terms of technical fitness, the role of complex environmental dynamism with multiple types of environmental dynamism, and the cognition and perception of environmental dynamism [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-disaster socioeconomic recovery is often driven by private businesses undertaking entrepreneurial activities. For instance, a Fortune article entitled 'The Only Lifeline was the Walmart' documents the role that Walmart played in providing goods and services to those in New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on role theory, our study focuses on organizations that perform roles during disasters not ordinarily expected of them, but which often play critical parts in the resilience of communities. We term those organizations 'disaster entrepreneurs'. We propose that there are three different forms of disaster entrepreneurship: remaking/improvising roles (e.g., organizations such as churches or shopping malls becoming shelters on an ad-hoc basis and as the need arises), activating latent roles (e.g., private businesses activating pre-existing plans to assume a different role during a disaster, such as Waffle House activating mobile command centers), and scaling roles (i.e., businesses, typically from outside the community, assisting with the provision of goods and/or services when demand is scaled up and cannot be filled by the community alone). We develop propositions how disaster entrepreneurship contributes to community-level resilience and supports communities in returning to "normal" functioning following a disaster impact. We conclude with implications for future research on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the creation and development of dynamic capabilities. In contrast to prior work, we argue that many environmental disturbances are repeated and not entirely new or stochastic. We argue that dynamic capabilities are developed in response to the more persistent aspects of these disturbances. Using the case study of the American automotive industry between 1965 and 2010, we draw a picture of the disturbances experienced by firms in this industry, such as labor disruptions, energy challenges, and economic cycles. We show inductively that firms first managed only to cope in the face of new disturbances by deploying existing dynamic capabilities that had been developed to address prior disturbances. Eventually these firms layered on new capabilities that improved the technical fitness of their dynamic capabilities. The interacting layers of capabilities that these firms built formed an architecture that further improved evolutionary fitness. This research contributes to prior work in dynamic capabilities, pointing to the importance of understanding how different types of environmental dynamism shape dynamic capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]