Editorial
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-09-2021-390 |
| Published date | 13 October 2021 |
| Date | 13 October 2021 |
| Pages | 817-822 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Knowledge management,HR & organizational behaviour,Organizational structure/dynamics,Accounting & finance,Accounting/accountancy,Behavioural accounting |
| Author | Gregorio Martín-de Castro,María Paz Salmador |
Editorial
Intellectual capital and corporate environmental proactiveness
The growing concern of citizens and businesses on the preservation of the natural
environment, together with the increasing interest of management, marketing and strategy
scholars on the impact of organizations on the natural environment, led to the emergence of a
body of the management literature during the nineties of the twentieth century focused on the
relationship between the organization and the natural environment (Arag
on-Correa et al.,
2016;Christmann, 2000;Hart, 1995,Porter and van der Linde, 1995). This phenomenon
happened in parallel with the emergence of corporate social performance and disclosure
practices, and firm awareness about the importance of public relations and image in the areas
of environmental respect (Mart
ın-de Castro et al., 2016).
Academic scholars and business practitioners, mainly from management and strategic
management, have explored how companies can address this important challenge and how to
fit firm competitiveness and profitability to natural environment respect. From the academy,
since the publication of two seminal works in 1995 (Hart, 1995;Porter and van der Linde,
1995), many efforts have been made in order to explore corporate environmentalism and its
effects on business strategy (Arag
on-Correa, 1998) and management. From public policy and
business practitioners’spheres, initiatives such as the European Commission in 2015 on
Circular Economy or the UN 2030 Agenda on sustainable development objectives show the
growing importance given to the natural environment in economy, business and society.
How companies face environmental concerns determines their proactiveness towards the
natural environment. In this sense, a basic distinction implies reactive versus proactive
environmental strategies (Sharma and Vredenburgh, 1998). Thus, on one side, a reactive
environmental positioning can be understood as a strategic response to normative and
stakeholders’pressures, implying many times just the adoption of market end-of-pipe
technological solutions to control pollution (Hart, 1995) with little changes in the internal
resource endowments and organization of the firm. This posture has been typically framed
under the institutional theory (Delmas and Toffel, 2008;Bansal and Roth, 2005) as a corporate
legitimizing process, and sometimes symbolic compliance, in the environmental arena. On the
other side, a proactive environmental strategy puts environmental concern and pollution
prevention at the heart of firm’s strategy, anticipating future regulations and social trends by
changing operations, process and products to prevent negative environmental impacts
(Arag
on-Correa and Sharma, 2003). Typically, most proactive environmental strategies have
been framed under the natural and contingence resource-based view (Arag
on-Correa and
Sharma, 2003;Hart, 1995). This proactive positioning implies deep changes in its business
strategy, structure, human resource practices, operations and business models, which require
the development of environmental innovations, new management tools and the external
projection of the firm and stakeholders’engagement. Thus, firms have to carry out important
internal and external changes in order to develop effective proactive corporate
environmentalism as the development of new environmental resources and capabilities in
different business areas, such as innovation, human resources, culture, organizational
routines, as well reinforcing ties with internal and external stakeholders’engagement
through corporate communication and reporting, strategic alliances and networking, and
improving their legitimacy and reputation.
Our proposal is that these new environmental resources and capabilities are mainly based
on knowledge and are of intangible nature, where an intellectual capital-based view as a
middle-range theory (Bueno et al., 2014;Mart
ın-de Castro et al., 2011;Reed et al., 2006)
Editorial
817
Journal of Intellectual Capital
Vol. 22 No. 5, 2021
pp. 817-822
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1469-1930
DOI 10.1108/JIC-09-2021-390
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