Purpose: This study aims to examine whether corporate sustainability practices act as a shield ensuring financial performance in times of crisis.

Design/methodology/approach: Data from 471 European firms during 2018–23 were categorized into three periods: (1) before the Covid-19 pandemic, (2) during the pandemic, and (3) during the Russia-Ukraine War. In this regard, pooled ordinary least squares (POLS), two-step generalized method of moments (GMM), Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney non-parametric tests were performed to examine the impact of crises and whether corporate sustainability practices act as a shield to ensure financial performance.

Findings: The proponents of the resource-based view have argued that corporate sustainability practices create additional valuable resources that might work as a shield for ensuring financial performance even in times of crisis. While many studies have examined the impact of the recent pandemic, few compare the impacts of the war’s repercussions on business performance. This study found a distinction between natural (Covid) and human-induced crises (war) on corporate financial performance. The results suggest that sustainability practices might work as a shield during a natural crisis but not during a human-induced one. 

Practical implications: We observed that throughout the Covid-19 period, policymakers extended assistance to businesses, but during the subsequent European geopolitical crisis, their ability to offer such support has been absent. This absence might have a negative impact on corporate financial performance as government support increases investor confidence which artificially boosts market valuations. In addition, with the experience of Covid-19, investors might consider issues other than corporate sustainability practices when evaluating the market value of a firm. Even though we have seen an increasing trend in sustainability practices since the start of Covid-19 and continuing through the Russia-Ukraine war, these practices are not significantly reflected in or valued by investors.

Originality: This study sheds light on the comparative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War upon business performance and raises the bar on the theoretical understanding through a resource-based view (RBV).

© 2025, ABM Fazle Rahi, Jeaneth Johansson, Asif M. Huq and Fredrik Hartwig.

This study contributes to the debate on the role of spatial contexts in rural entrepreneurship. Drawing on rural and indigenous entrepreneurship theory, we explore how four Sámi entrepreneurs from Sweden and Norway engage with their spatial contexts. We employ a multiple-case study design, an interpretive philosophy of science, and elements from indigenous research methodologies. Our findings demonstrate that the entrepreneurs engage both within and across their spatial contexts, encompassing environments both nearby and far away. We also identify drivers and practices associated with this entrepreneurial engagement. Based on the findings, we develop The Sámi Entrepreneurial Engagement Framework. The framework serves as an illustration of how a Sámi perspective adds new insight into the field of rural entrepreneurship and offers a comprehensive lens for understanding entrepreneurial engagement with spatial contexts in culturally rich and environmentally sensitive settings. Copyright © The Author(s) 2025.

In the transition towards a circular economy and more sustainable business practices, industrial symbiosis (IS) has emerged as a promising strategy to enhance resource efficiency, reduce waste, and generate economic and environmental benefits. Despite its well-documented advantages, IS adoption remains fragmented and inconsistent across industries and regions, raising critical questions about the drivers and barriers that influence its implementation. Energy-based IS, particularly bioenergy production like biogas, exemplifies the complexities of IS adoption. Thus, this study seeks to examine the interplay between drivers and barriers and their effect on adoption and implementation of biogas-based IS on five industrial symbioses, where additional challenges, such as competition with fossil fuels and fragmented supply chains add further complexity. The results show that economic incentives drive industrial biogas symbioses, social factors, especially collaboration and networking, are crucial enablers. A higher number of social barriers, compared to environmental ones, underscores that trust, cooperative competence, and stable relationships are not peripheral but essential. This research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of biogas IS adoption, offering insights for business managers, policymakers, and sustainability practitioners seeking to advance IS as a scalable strategy for circular economy transitions.

The implementation of water-related environmental measures (WREMs) in agricultural businesses presents an opportunity to align food production with sustainable value creation through ecosystem services. However, the complexity of adopting these measures, and making them a part of business models, necessitates the involvement of intermediaries to facilitate business opportunities that align with governmental sustainability goals. This study investigates the role of government-affiliated intermediaries in facilitating agricultural business plans, motives, and support needs for implementing WREMs. Using baseline and follow-up questionnaire data from 255 agricultural business managers, the study finds that intermediaries play a crucial role in fostering long-term sustainability commitments. Their facilitation, through expert advice, knowledge transfer, and resource mobilization, significantly increased the likelihood of businesses planning semi-long-term WREMs. However, the correlation between WREMs and market-driven value creation remained weak, highlighting the need for enhanced support in developing financially viable sustainability solutions. These findings underscore the importance of aligning intermediation strategies with business managers’ financial incentives to drive broader adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. © 2025 The Author(s).

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) of chronic diseases represents a care modality with great potential to substantially improve outcomes and reduce hospital admission and costs to society. Empirical research has examined the processes of RPM adoption and implementation; however, implementation of RPM–a complex technological and health service innovation–remains challenging. Various analytical frameworks have tried to understand the conditions for successful adoption and implementation of RPM and other complex healthcare innovations. This conceptual study argues that incorporation of lessons from literature on institutional logics could enrich these frameworks. Healthcare is a domain influenced by multiple competing, collaborating or co-existing institutional logics such as professional, state, market, corporate and increasingly a community logic, expressed in patient-centred care principles. We outline the concept of patient-centred care as an emerging institutional logic and explore how to incorporate it into two widely used analytical frameworks, NASSS (‘non-adoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability’) and normalisation process theory (NPT). The main benefit of adding an institutional logics approach to the NPT framework is primarily to increase awareness of how institutional logics at meso-and macro-levels may affect the scope of implementation at a micro-level. In the case of the NASSS framework institutional logics provides a rationale for achieving cross-level alignment between domains. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Adopting digital technologies in different organizations has become a trend over the last decade, yet our understanding regarding impact of digital technologies on strategising needs to be more cohersive. This paper reviews existing research on how digital transformation intersects with strategic management to adress this gap. Specifically, the aim is to explore how the digital context changes strategising. Based on a systematic review of empirical evidence from 163 journal papers, we showcased the manifestation of strategising in the digital age in terms of strategic practitioners, practices and praxis. By consolidating these findings, a typology of strategic actions in the digital age is developed and discussed, highlighting the interplay among changes in strategy-as-practice parameters. This framework clarifies in strategic scenarios of digital transformation and identifies various strategic directions and actions. Overall, we argue that although digital transformation has created additional strategic options, it has yet to change the underlying assumptions of strategising in firms. © 2024 The Author(s). International Journal of Management Reviews published by British Academy of Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Improving sustainability performance and adapting to circular economy principles in operational business strategies are becoming increasingly prioritized. In this pursuit, the concept of industrial symbiosis (IS) has become increasingly relevant. IS represents a collaborative approach where the interplay of material, residual waste, energy, and infrastructure exchanges aims to yield not only economic and environmental advantages for the participating companies but also substantial societal benefits by using resources more efficiently. Biogas production is such an example, it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions since it can produce heat and electricity, replace renewable fuel for vehicles, or be used as input material for industrial use. The digestate from biogas production can also be used as an effective agricultural fertilizer to replace chemical fertilizers which are produced using fossil energy.

Digital tools and platforms in IS can be used to different extent depending on businesses levels of digital maturity (the extent to which businesses adapt to ongoing digital change and integrate digitalization). Digital tools and platforms hold a central role for developing various advantages in biogas-based IS, but since the digital maturity for IS focusing on biogas production is uncertain, the current efficiency obtained by tools and platforms is unknown. Therefore, through semi-structured interviews and study visits, this study assesses stakeholder collaboration and use of digital tools at five IS sites with biogas production in Sweden. It explores (i) current digital maturity and collaboration characteristics amongst established biogas-based IS, and (ii) needs amongst stakeholders for development of digital tools and platforms to promote digital maturity, monitoring, collaboration, and knowledge exchange in current and future IS structures.

Preliminary results of the on-going study show that the use of digital tools varies depending on the character and size of resource flows that are included in the collaboration, and due to the internal digital maturity of the involved companies. In general, the use of digital tools for stakeholder interaction is on low or medium level, in which manual handling is required and little is automated. This complies with the sites being relatively small, and the number of stakeholders involved are relatively few. Moreover, the preliminary results show that the interest of future development of digital tools is found to be related to business development and expanded market opportunities through diversified raw material use, increased production, and new distribution channels. In addition, a demand of digital platforms for exchange of experience and competence supply has been identified.

The discussion of “whether it pays to be green” is ongoing. This review does not intend to solve the debate, rather it soothes it by contributing to the concept of “when it pays to be green.” By focusing on the shortcomings of existing literature reviews on the topic of corporate sustainability and financial performance (CSFP) in this hybrid review, issues were identified that had been overlooked earlier. In general, CSFP holds a positive relationship but in a time lag. Nonconclusive results about the relationship within CSFP are due to self-selection bias, endogeneity issues, and the use of multiple datasets and industry categories. Surprisingly, we also discovered that the impact of sustainability on financial performance is elusive in capitalist countries considered to be economically rational. Institutional and legitimacy requirements are a good starting point for shaping corporate behaviors in the short term; however, they might not be equally appropriate in the long term in cases when corporations shift operations to pollution havens. A multifaceted, synergistic interaction between governmental institutions, corporations, and other stakeholders is required—without imposing authority—to ensure durable sustainable development. © 2023 The Authors. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Sustainability Reporting (SR) has become an essential task for accounting scholars where over the last 30 years, substantial developments in the academic literature on SR have been seen. However, the research on SR in the Construction and Real Estate (CRE) sector is in a nascent stage. To develop insights into current academic work and future research dimensions of SR, this study conducts a conceptual literature review for the CRE sector. The search and selection phase were performed in April 2024 yielding 49 articles from Scopus and Web of Science. The focus is on identifying dominant and unexplored perspectives; identifying key concepts, and connections between them, as well as the theoretical lenses applied. The contributions of this study are sixfold, as follows. First, it reveals that the literature on SR in the CRE sector is interdisciplinary and publishing in both accounting and non-accounting journals. Second, prior literature on SR of CRE, includes four dominant perspectives; disclosure diversity, practical barriers, rationales, and drivers of SR. Third, only a few links between these perspectives are outlined. However, it is argued to explore the interrelated links in all four perspectives. Fourth, the studies utilize few theoretical lenses, usually combining two or more theories, whilst most studies do not use any theoretical lens. Fifth, the institutional perspective is neglected in the literature. The studies address what, why, and how questions while there is a need for further investigation of when, where, and who. Finally, the outcomes of this literature review contribute to existing knowledge on accounting for sustainability. This study illuminates the views of how accountability drives sustainability accounting and how formal and informal institutions, may have a mutually reinforcing effect. The results of this review shed light on the critical concepts and perspectives relevant to SR in the CRE sector, hence contributing fresh insights into current studies and providing valuable guidance for future research and practice. © 2024 The Author(s)

We propose that technological, service-dominant and design logics must interplay for an IT artefact to succeed. Based on data from a project aiming at a B2B platform for manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Europe, we explore these three logics in an agile software design context. By using an inductive approach, we theorise about what is needed for the alignment of the three logics. We contribute with a novel theoretical lens, the Framework for Adaptive Space. We offer insights into the importance of continuously reflecting on all three logics during the agile software design process to ensure mutual understanding among the agile team and the B2B platform end-users involved. Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Inderscience Publishers Ltd.