Doctoral Dissertations

Bruce Clemens

Date of Award

5-1997

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Major Professor

Michael J. Stahl

Committee Members

Jack N. Barkenbus, Lawrence F. Miller, Graham Walford

Abstract

Join us and investigate the relationship between environmental interventions and the strategies of a regulated firm. The remarkable growth of the "Organizations and the Natural Environment" interest group in the Academy of Management and the recent special issue of the Academy of Management Review (October, 1995) attest to the burgeoning interest in this area. As our globe shrinks, the issue will become even more important.

Perhaps our most interesting, and potentially noteworthy, finding was that the degree of cooperation between regulated firms was the strongest predictor of a firm's strategies to address environmental interventions. We had hypothesized that the type of environmental interventions would be the best predictor. Au contraire, the way the firm cooperated with its competitors was significantly more important than the type of environmental intervention, more important that the size of the firm and more important than the degree of regulatory intensity in the state. One possible implication for the government is to consider encouraging inter-firm cooperation to lead to more positive environmental performance.

In the process of supporting three of our six hypotheses, we developed a solid, and hopefully useful, measure for a typology of environmental interventions. Over the past decade, the "carrot" type of environmental interventions have become more popular than the traditional "stick" approach. Government officials have found that the best way to encourage the "right environmental thing" is to provide incentives so that the right environmental thing is not the "wrong economic thing". We believe we have performed the first analytic verification of a typology of environmental interventions that emphasizes the "carrot" type approaches.

We also tested an improved method of factor analysis. Many consider factor analysis, one of the most common statistical tools in the management literature, "voodoo statistics". The title of one critique, "Tom Swift and his magic factor analytic machine", sums up this voodoo view. We feel that our method, originally proposed by Harris (1967), will encourage and facilitate more objective factor analyses.

We conducted two surveys of over 400 steel firms over a three year period. We were able to test if the firms changed strategies over the three years. The four year study was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the steel industry and the State of Tennessee.

We feel that our finding of the importance of collaboration and cooperation is noteworthy and could potentially contribute to sustainable development. In the words of Gladwin, Kennelly and Krause (1995:900) {1082} "transforming management theory and practice so that they positively contribute to sustainable development is, in our view, the greatest challenge facing the Academy of Management".

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