Are corporations responding to civil society pressure?: A multilevel analysis of corporate emissions

• Main Author: RIEGER, Annika Marie
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: world society; world-systems; corporate emissions; climate change; Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics; Energy Policy; Work, Economy and Organizations
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3948; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5206/viewcontent/Rieger_SocDev_2024.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Previous research in the world-society tradition associates improvements in nation-level environmental outcomes with greater civil society integration. However, research in the world-systems tradition indicates these improvements depend on a nation’s position in the global political-economic hierarchy. To test whether these patterns are present at the organizational level, I estimate a multilevel model using corporate emissions data from the Carbon Disclosure Project and include interactions between world-system position and three measures of civil society integration: number of NGOs, proportion of corporations with climate-management incentives, and number of corporate UN Global Compact signatories. I find that the relationship between civil society pressure and corporate emissions varies with a nation’s position in the world-system. The NGO measure is associated with greater emissions in non-core nations, possibly due to means–ends decoupling or corporate greenwashing. The climate-incentives measure is associated with less corporate-level emissions in the core and more emissions in non-core nations, possibly due to successful regulation in the core leading to ecologically unequal exchange. I argue that reducing corporate emissions requires accounting for increasingly complicated macro-sociological contexts, as corporations are pressured by and incorporated into world society and participate in patterns of unequal exchange in the world-system.