How firms leverage internal and external sources of environmental capabilities: Three essays on environmental sourcing

Abstract

<p>This dissertation provides a comprehensive investigation of environmental sourcing strategies from both inter-organizational and business-to-consumer (BTC) perspectives. The dissertation consists of three essays that shed insight into the dynamics of a firm’s environmental sourcing strategies. The dissertation begins with a systematic literature review to analyzing prior literature’s stances on a firm’s pursuit of environmental management (EM) capabilities. The first essay provides an up-to-date and comprehensive review of environmental supply chain management literature. The second essay examines environmental sourcing strategies from an inter-organizational perspective and aims to investigate why buying firms are willing to increase their overall business-volume with suppliers who have strong environmental expertise. The study empirically tests proposed hypotheses using a unique buyer-supplier dyadic data set drawn from multiple secondary data sources. The third essay takes a business-to-consumer (BTC) perspective and seeks to understand how consumers can become affected by a firm’s environmentally-irresponsible sourcing practices. The study employs a series of three vignette-based experiments that test study hypotheses. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the advancement supply chain, environmental sourcing, consumer behavior, and product-harm crises literatures by providing a nuanced understanding of factors that influence firms to opt for environmental sourcing.</p>