Coercive and normative pressures and firms’ environmental innovation in it-intensive contexts

Abstract

Institutional theory has been extensively used to explain firms’ adoption of environmental practices; however, information technologies’ effects on institutional pressures have received limited attention. Some contend that IT-intensive contexts provide firms with more opportunities to absorb external knowledge and amplify social agents’ messages. Meanwhile, some others highlight that IT- intensive contexts increase the risks of the institutional pressures being diluted in a muddle of heterogeneous and contradictory voices. Our empirical analysis is based on an assessment of the environmental innovations of 2,955 firms in 54 countries and 21 business activities from 2012 to 2016. The results confirm the positive influence of coercive and normative environmental pressures on firms’ environmental innovations; however, they also show that in a high intensity IT context, the influence of normative institutional pressures on environmental innovations increase, while those of coercive pressures go down. These findings have important practical and theoretical implications.