Of floods and gales: environmental value creation due to creative destruction

Abstract

Recent discussions on environmental issues, such as global climate change, implicates many of the wider processes studied by scholars in the management sciences. As a result, there has been considerable debate regarding the boundary conditions of topics such as environmental sustainability as a distinct field of study within management, especially given the ongoing mismatch between existing epistemological lines of enquiry and traditional reliance on different analyses levels in prior work. If topics such as environmental entrepreneurship and corporate sustainability are theoretically distinct from wider management sciences, what limits this argument further is a general lack of agreed upon outcome criteria and an absence of an appropriate dependent variable. Thus, what is still needed is an elaboration on the ecological outcomes of different organizational behaviors and choices. Without such an appropriate construct to guide research efforts, scholars may risk diverging in their collective understanding of the phenomenon, missing important near-term research questions or misleading future scholarship altogether. The purpose of the present dissertation is to derive a delineated outcome measure of sustainability - namely, environmental value creation, from the existing body of interdisciplinary research on the topic from a management standpoint. I analyze organization-level data on resource consumption, meso-level firm entry data, macro-level economic data and energy-based emissions data to model the spatio-temporal interactions. With an emphasis on energy, this dissertation tests and models the effects of various interventions considering the spatial and temporal heterogeneity in subsequent ecological outcomes. I limit the definition of environmental sustainability within discussions of energy-based carbon emissions that drives global climate change. The theoretical derivation and empirical conceptualization contain herein not only contributes by extending the discussion of environmental sustainability within management as a unique stream of research but enables the exploration of new research questions within the broader field through its use in future research designs and studies.