Enterprises Green Ionnovation Path Research Under Multiple Institutuonal Pressures:the Configuration Of "Strategic Felxibility-Environmental Ethics"

The world is facing two serious problems:the environment deterioration and the resources shortage.In the process of green transformation of energy conservation,consumption reduction and pollution reduction,enterprises are faced with multiple institutional pressures from the government and the market.Green innovation aimed at reducing environmental,pollution in the process of innovation has attracted widespread attention.Companies must respond to changes of the external environment and achieve green innovation.However,enterprises how to configure strategic flexibility and environmental ethics to achieve green innovation under the multiple institutional pressures remains to be solved.Therefore,we take a mixed method,which combines exploratory multiple case studies with fuzzy-sets qualitative comparative approach to explore the green innovation path of enterprises under the multiple institutional pressures.Firstly,through the grounded theory,we summarize the factors affecting the company’s green innovation from the interviews and other data,and extract the measurement table of these factors.And the measurement table of these factors provides the basis for variable coding.Then,based on the fuzzy sets qualitative comparative approach,the fsQCA software is used to calibrate and combine the influencing factors obtained after encoding,and all configuration combination of influencing factors is obtained.Then through the case frequency and consistency threshold to filter,we can obtain the final green innovation path,which reveals the complementary and alternative relationship between institutional pressure,strategic flexibility and environmental ethics.Finally,illustrating the mechanism of each path through exploratory multi-case studies.The findings are as follows.Firstly,institutional pressure,strategic flexibility and environmental ethics are important factors influencing enterprise green innovation.Secondly,we find five unique green innovation paths:passive survival,avoiding disadvantages for profit,spontaneous transformation1,spontaneous transformation2 and identifying strain.In the path of passive survival,the normative pressure substitutes resource flexibility,coordination flexibility and environmental ethics.In the path of avoiding disadvantages for profit,regulatory pressure,normative pressure,resource flexibility,and coordination flexibility are complementary.In the path of spontaneous transformation 1,resource flexibility and coordination flexibility are complementary and substitute regulatory pressure,normative pressure.In the path of spontaneous transformation 2,environmental ethics,resource flexibility and coordination flexibility are complementary and substitute regulatory pressure.In the path of identifying strain,normative pressure and environmental ethics,resource flexibility,coordination flexibility are complementary.This research has theoretical significance for institutional theory and dynamic capability theory,and it has practical significance for enterprise green innovation path selection and policy formulation.According to the results of the path analysis,the enterprise can select the appropriate green innovation path according to its own situation,in response to institutional pressure and obtain legality.The government will use appropriate means and methods to supervise enterprises according to the different drivers of green innovation path,and encourage and support enterprises to carry out active environmental management practices and environmental voluntary agreement plans to accelerate corporate green innovation behavior.