Conference Programme
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available). Note that the schedule is subject to changes.
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Daily Overview |
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Parallel Session 02: Customers, Nonmarket Stakeholders, and Corporate Sustainability Location: Seminar Room 7 (Level 2) Session Chair: Guoli Chen, INSEAD | |
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Balancing Breadth and Depth: Stakeholder Reactions to Firms’ Grand Challenge Strategies 1: Tilburg University; 2: University of Toronto; 3: University of Cambridge Research suggests that firms often address a wide range of societal issues with their social impact initiatives (i.e., breadth strategy) at the expense of achieving meaningful impact on select issues (i.e., depth strategy). This arises from a distortion in the market for social impact where stakeholders who support and reward firms for addressing societal issues (e.g., consumers), are not directly affected by firms’ efforts in addressing societal grand challenges and constrained in evaluating their impact. We argue and show that nonmarket stakeholders, such as non-governmental organizations, who are more informed about and focused on societal impact, play a disciplining role in the market for social impact. Using data on 2,711 firms’ operational and product alignment with the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we demonstrate that nonmarket stakeholders are more likely to criticize firms for superficial breadth strategies, particularly in environments with high information reliability. We also find that nonmarket stakeholders view depth strategies more favorably, especially those involving operational efforts rather than product-related initiatives, as operational efforts are perceived as more holistic, less symbolic, and better at mitigating risks. | |