Abstract
Increasing concerns over global and local sustainability issues motivate businesses to develop solutions via collaborative partnerships. While many studies explain the contributions of sustainable alliances to economic, environmental, and social sustainability, less is known about how a portfolio of these alliances is configured. This study aims to answer this question by examining the relationship between organisational value frames and alliance portfolio configurations of 16 utility companies in the electricity industry of Great Britain. The study finds that organisational value frames play a key role in the selection of alliance partners and hence the configuration of alliance portfolios. The results demonstrate that British electricity utilities often collaborate with cognitively similar organisations. The results demonstrate that cognitive homophily is common in selecting partners to tackle sustainability issues. While previous studies demonstrated homophily in partner selection as resource homophily or status homophily, in the sustainability context, this study shows that homophily is also about values that guide interpretations of sustainability issues.
Highlights
IntroductionA recent review on sustainable alliances suggests that this literature is fragmented based on the type of partner (e.g., NGO, business, government, or research) or the type of sustainability issue (e.g., climate action, sustainable food production, sustainable cities or communities) [8]
The systemic, complex, and technical nature of sustainability problems motivates businesses to form various collaborative arrangements that address different sustainability issues [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The electricity sector is a sector where legislation is critical in the transition to a low carbon economy, and different policy instruments are used to motivate market players to move towards green energy and sustainable practices [91]
Summary
A recent review on sustainable alliances suggests that this literature is fragmented based on the type of partner (e.g., NGO, business, government, or research) or the type of sustainability issue (e.g., climate action, sustainable food production, sustainable cities or communities) [8]. Often due to this fragmentation, prior studies take a single type of alliance as a unit of analysis [8].
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