Research On The Impact Of Institutional Logic Conflict On Environmental Strategy Greenwashing

Nowadays,with ecological resources and environment deteriorating,governments of have paid more attention to the ecological environment protection than before.The 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China incorporated ecological civilization into the construction of socialist modernization,and the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized that we should practice the idea of "Clear waters and green mountains are as good as mountains of gold and silver" to develop the economic value contained in the ecological environment,realizing the balanced and sustainable development of the economy,society and environment.Therefore,Chinese government is committed to developing corporate environmental institutions,driving companies to implement environmental strategies and incorporate environmental responsibilities into corporate strategic planning and daily management operations.So far,more and more companies claim that they have implemented environmental strategy,however,academic research and media reports have consistently pointed out that many enterprises’ environmental strategies are greenwashing.In other words,enterprises symbolically formulate environmental strategic plans,but lack substantial environmental strategy implementation and environmental performance improvement.Scholars have made a series of remarkable and enlightening research results on environmental strategy and greenwashing,but there are still deficiencies in the research on the driving factors and mechanism of enterprise environmental strategy greenwashing.Relevant research lacks the discussion on the institutional logics conflict in the field,especially the attention on government environmental institutions and market logic conflict.In this thesis,environmental strategy greenwashing is regarded as the result of the response from the management cognition level to the strategic level for the field institutional logics conflict.Specifically,the following three questions are explored:(1)How does the field institutional logics conflict affect corporate environmental strategic greenwashing?(2)What mediating role does management cognition play between institutional logics conflict and greenwashing of environmental strategies?(3)How can organizational resources adjust the relationship between institutional logics conflict and greenwashing of environmental strategies?This thesis mainly carries out from the following three progressive modules: Module 1,based on the theory of institutional complexity and combined with the background of Chinese institutions,we analyze the impact of institutional logics conflict on the greenwashing of environmental strategies in the field,and specifically analyze the impact of industrial environmental regulation-competitive market logic conflict and industrial environmental regulation-turbulence market logic conflict on environmental strategy greenwashing;Module2,based on strategic issue diagnosis and constructivist theory,we explore the mediating role of environmental protection and market issues relevance in the management cognitive structure between the field institutional logics conflict and the greenwashing of environmental strategies;Module 3,based on the perspective of strategic issue diagnosis and resource-based view,we discuss the moderating role of three organizational resources,including political resources,relational resources,and green human resources,in the process of “field institutional logics conflict---cognitive structure---environmental strategy greenwashing”.Based on the institutional complexity theory,diagnostic model of strategic issues,constructivism theory,and resource-based view theory,this thesis presents theoretical analysis and empirical research on the above issues comprehensively using the structured secondary data of Chinese listed enterprises and the content analysis data of corporate social responsibility reports,and mainly draws the following three conclusions:(1)Field institutional logics conflict is the driving factor of enterprise environmental strategy greenwashing,and has a significant positive influence.The implementation of enterprise environmental strategy faces the dilemma of environmental institutions and multiple constraints of market environment logic.Under the pressure of industry environmental system,the pursuit of legitimacy drives enterprises to make environmental strategic plan.However,with the increasing domination of competition market logic and turbulence market logic in the industry,the enterprises have to allocate more resources to solve the problems of organizational survival.In the guidance of such market logic,managers tend to respond only symbolically to the requirements of environmental system,playing the role of communication and publicity of environmental strategy,and avoiding implementing environmental strategy so as to save operating costs.Finally,the conflict of system logic drives enterprise environmental strategy into the trap of greenwashing.(2)In the cognitive structure of management,environmental protection and market issues relevance plays a significant mediating role between the field institutional logics conflict and environmental strategy greenwashing.Managers construct their own cognitive structure of management by learning in the context of field institutional logics conflict.With the intensification of industry market competition and market turbulence leading to institutional logics conflict in industry fields intensified,managers will gradually abandon the cognitive structure of integration of environmental protection and market logic.Because management cognition can guide environmental strategic behavior,managers believe that it is difficult to achieve logical integration between the market and environmental protection,which constitutes the premise of environmental strategy greenwashing.(3)Organizational resources can play a moderating role through the mediation of cognitive structure of management,which partially confirms the moderating role of political resources,does not confirm the moderating role of relational resources,and completely confirms the moderating role of green human resources.By providing enterprises with land,financial funds and bank loans,political resources provide necessary resources for alleviating the conflict between environmental institution and market logic.However,due to the inertia of innovation,political resources are difficult to provide support for the innovation in the volatile market,and they cannot alleviate the impact of the conflict between environmental institution and market turbulence on the environmental strategy greenwashing.Green human resources can provide enterprises with green technology capability,improving efficiency and reducing cost for the implementation of environmental strategy,and meanwhile cultivating green organization culture and values.So green human resources weaken the resistance of organization members to the implementation of environmental strategy,and provide a stronger ability to alleviate institutional logics conflict.Although relational resources can provide enterprises with funds,information,and reputation,they also weaken government supervision.Therefore,relational resources cannot effectively alleviate the impact of institutional logic conflicts on the greenwashing of environmental strategies.In addition,the cognitive structure of management is the mediating path for political resources and green human resources to play a moderating role.The key to mitigate the impact of institutional logics conflict is to avoid the internalization of conflicts from the field level to the cognitive level of management.In this process,organizations become part of the learning context for managers to construct cognitive structures.The sufficient resources owned by organizations can enable managers to perceive the weakening of conflicts in daily work and construct an explanation of the correlation between environmental protection and market issues at the cognitive level,and guide environmental strategy behavior,which effectively weaken the impact of field institutional logics conflict on environmental strategy greenwashing.The theoretical contributions of this research are as follows:(1)the study of "greenwashing" focuses on the duplicity of environmental strategies,and complements the deficiency of strategic corporate social responsibility views.Different from the effect of the implementation of environmental strategy on the economic benefits of enterprises from the perspective of strategic corporate social responsibility,this research focuses on the duplicity between strategy formulation and implementation caused by the cost and risk of the implementation of enterprise environmental strategy,and uses the perspective of decoupling to analyze The greenwashing of environmental strategy takes a more dialectical approach to the issue of environmental strategy and guides the development of environmental strategy research to a deeper level.(2)This research analyzes environmental strategic behavior from the perspective of institutional logics conflict,which makes up for the deficiency of institutional isomorphism perspective of corporate environmental strategy research.Different from the previous analysis based on the perspective of institutional isomorphic pressure,this study emphasizes that enterprises are simultaneously faced with multiple and inconsistent institutional logics.Based on our country’s ecological civilization and the status of market environment,this research concretizes the conflict between institutional logics,that is,the conflict between industrial environmental institutional logic and the market logic,and puts forward the research framework which accords with the realistic background in our country.From the perspective of institutional logics conflict,this research leads to the analysis of greenwashing of environmental strategies,enriching the research area of environmental strategy,and supplementing the lack of explanatory power of institutional isomorphism theory in previous environmental strategydriven research.(3)This research studies the cognitive path and resource constraints of strategic decisionmaking under institutional logics conflict,which makes up for the lack of discussion on internal mechanism in strategic response research under institutional logics conflict.This paper abstracts the strategic decision-making problem under institutional logics conflict as the choice of conflict management strategy,and analyzes the cognitive path and resource constraints of conflict strategy choice.On the one hand,this research introduces the theory of strategic issue diagnosis and constructivism,and reveals the micro-psychological transmission mechanism from the macroinstitutional environment to strategic behavior.It points out that the formation of management cognitive structure is the process by which managers construct the meaning of the real world through situational learning,enhancing the theoretical depth of institutional environment shaping management cognition research.Through describing the correlation between environmental protection and market issues in the management cognitive structure in detail,this research can better explain how the complex institutional environment shapes the multiple structure of management cognition,changing the previous analysis mode of management cognition which is confined to a single cognitive focus.On the other hand,combining the resource-based view and the diagnostic perspective of strategic issues,this research analyzes and compares the moderating effects of organizational resources(political resources,relational resources,and green human resources)on the relationship between field institutional logics conflict and the greenwashing of environmental strategies,and how the moderating effects are realized through the mediating effect of the management cognitive structure.This thesis explains the stage and micro-psychological mechanism of the regulating factors.Compared with the previous general boundary condition analysis,which did not open the cognitive process,it is further in-depth and detailed.(4)This research provides a measurement tool for management cognitive structure,extending the limitations of previous empirical research methods.By constructing keyword network relations to measure cognitive structure,and by using computer program automatic text analysis to achieve large-sample research,this thesis reduces the difficulty of empirical research to measure the cognitive structure of management,and changes the over-reliance on qualitative methods in the research of cognitive structure of management.The practical implications of this research are as follows: This thesis suggests the government optimize the financing environment,provide government services,guide the formation of benign management cognition,and solve the resource dilemma of private enterprises.This thesis suggests the corporates strengthen the long-term orientation of management cognition,gain green management knowledge and implement green human resource plans to form corporate green development capabilities.