Moving in Tandem or Failing Altogether: Managing Resource Configurations for Responsible Practice Development

Abstract

Why do so many responsible business initiatives fail? While earlier studies have stressed the lack of commitment, we know little about the ways in which prosocial firms seek to secure the requisite resources to accomplish such practices. This study investigates how the management of multiple resource dependencies impacts the (non)accomplishment of a firm’s aspired responsible practices. A granular, comparative study of six prosocial firms embarking on voluntary environmental practices over a decade shows that mainstreamed development resulted from securing the full-fledged and sustained support of all complementary resource providers over a longer period, whereas practices facing constrained or missing resources turned into partial or outright failures. Securing multiple resources involves several problems (resource inaccessibility, resource dispersion, and resource instability), which firms address through different mechanisms. They empathically mobilize resources to overcome resistance from reluctant actors, enact integrative structures to secure resources from dispersed actors, and reshuffle resources to respond to fluctuations in availability and need. The combined use of these mechanisms does not guarantee success but is imperative to overcome the barriers that threaten the mainstreaming of responsible practices. These insights have implications for the corporate responsibility, resource dependence, and ecosystem literatures.