Corporate environmental strategy: Extending the natural resource based view of the firm

What drives corporate environmental strategies, and how can such strategies generate economic pay-offs? To answer this question, I integrate the results of various empirical studies on environmental strategy. I build upon Hart’s (1995) natural resource-based view, and unbundle the antecedents and consequences of corporate environmental strategy. I argue that the natural resource-based view should be repositioned to incorporate the organizational context of environmental investment decisions, and show that investment in specific resource domains, not environmental strategy per se, ultimately determines performance. My literature review and repositioning culminates in an integrative framework to advance recent debates within the resource-based view and corporate environmental strategy literatures. I use my integrative framework to predict when and how environmental strategy pays off.;This thesis is a quantitative study on the oil and gas producers in Canada. An extensive survey was conducted with the senior environmental managers or senior Vice Presidents responsible for environmental matters. Statistically significant relationships are found to support the importance of environmental context in predicting the firms’ investment in Hart-type resource domains which also demonstrate a statistically significant and positive relationship with firm specific capabilities. Two types of firm specific capabilities are discussed here and both are found to have statistically significant and positive relationships with competitive advantage. Of particular interest is that through statistical analyses of my sample data, a spine made up of positive and significant predictors emerge from my framework. The spine threads through my entire framework to show the main trajectory a firm could chose on how to be green and develop competitive advantage.