Unmasking Corporate Sustainability at the Project Level: Exploring the Influence of Institutional Logics and Individual Agency

Abstract

Due to their consolidated nature, corporate sustainability reports often mask the evolution of organizations’ sustainability initiatives. Thus, to more fully understand the environmental performance of an organization, it is essential to examine the experiences of specific projects and how they relate to corporate sustainability. Based on case studies of green projects in four different organizations, we find that it is difficult to determine the environmental impact of a project a priori, even in cases where environmental considerations are included as part of the initial project scope. Instead, the decision to integrate environmentally favorable elements into projects is a dynamically occurring interaction between competing institutional logics and organizational identities, which create windows of opportunity for individual agency. During these windows, individuals may engage in reinforcing microprocesses that support traditional practices, or invoke enabling microprocesses to facilitate green decision-making, consistent with ecosystem logics. The process model developed in this paper provides a new perspective on the temporal and contextual dimensions of environmental championship behaviors, and sheds light on otherwise puzzling results such as why organizations with strong environmental orientations continue to struggle with delivering projects with strong positive environmental impacts.