Three Studies on Navigating Sustainability Concerns
Open Access DepositedIt’s (Not) Our Problem, Crowdfunding Postcards and Multimodal Optimal Distinctiveness
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How does management’s construction of voluntary climate risk disclosures affect third-party environmental ratings? Using climate risk disclosures from annual reports, I analyze the extent to which firms construct their climate risks in a way that reflects an external versus internal orientation. Whereas prior studies on climate risk disclosure predominantly adopt an information perspective, viewing climate risk as an information asymmetry problem, I complement it with a social constructivist view, which underscores that the scope and features of climate risks are defined by organizational actors rather than through discovering and disclosing predetermined risks. This study contributes by offering an alternative constructivist view of climate risk, revealing that management’s agentic stance on climate change informs the meaning-making process in third-party assessments. The second study shifts the focus toward how recent technological developments, particularly online platforms, can facilitate the scaling of social impact through entrepreneurial processes. Addressing sustainability concerns requires not only changes in existing corporate practices but also novel resource mobilization mechanisms for sustainable development. In the second study, I aim to understand how online platforms can scale social impact, with a particular focus on entrepreneurial narratives and impact-driven audiences. Building upon the concept of optimal distinctiveness and theories on communication modes, I theorize how the distinctiveness of visual and textual narrative components differs in appealing to impact-driven audiences. Furthermore, I theorize the relative impact of an initial mini-pitch—the succinct entrepreneurial story usually leveraging visuals along with verbal text to communicate the essence of an entrepreneurial endeavor—compared to a subsequent fuller story. Analyzing borrowing campaigns pitched on Kiva over 16 years, both mini-pitches (in the form of image-text pairs) and fuller descriptions, I find that visual category congruence and verbal category distinctiveness are positively related to funding success, but only verbal category distinctiveness leads to faster funding. Moreover, I find that mini-pitches have a greater impact on accelerating the funding process than fuller stories. My findings caution against assuming that audiences equally engage in each fuller entrepreneurial story and assuming visual and verbal modes of entrepreneurial narratives have similar impacts on audience support. In the third study, I extend the multimodal distinctiveness framework developed in my second study by asking whether the contrasting effects of visual and verbal distinctiveness hold in innovation‐oriented crowdfunding and with novelty‐seeking audiences. This question speaks to the broader sustainability of innovation ecosystems
The goal of this doctoral thesis is to advance knowledge on how emerging sustainability concerns shape organizational practices and audience evaluation in two distinct yet interconnected research areas. The first area of research concerns how organizations identify and integrate emergent sustainability issues such as climate risks. Specifically, my work in this area focuses on understanding how climate risks are constructed and interpreted by management, as reflected in disclosures, and their impact on external evaluations. The second area of research examines how recent advancements in technology and innovation, such as digital transformation, the rise of online platforms, and artificial intelligence, contribute to advancing global sustainability and innovation efforts, with a particular focus on multimodal entrepreneurial narratives on online platforms. Theoretically, my research contributes to the evolving social construction view of climate risk and the multimodal view of optimal distinctiveness to mobilize resources. Empirically, my work focuses on climate risk disclosure for S&P 500 firms and entrepreneurial narratives on the prosocial lending platform Kiva and the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Across the three studies, I compile and analyze large-scale unstructured data using cutting-edge tools in natural language processing and computer vision. More broadly, I aim to push the theoretical and methodological boundaries of organizational research. In the first study, I ask
unlike traditional venture capital—which backs only a narrow slice of ventures—crowdfunding platforms democratize access to resources and cultivate inclusive, community‐driven innovation. Drawing on a large sample of Kickstarter campaigns, I find evidence for the contrasting effects of visual and verbal distinctiveness largely consistent with my prior study. I further explore the interaction between visual and verbal narratives, showing that campaigns combining low visual distinctiveness with high verbal distinctiveness achieve the most favorable outcomes, whereas campaigns that exhibit high distinctiveness in both modalities tend to perform the worst. Taken together, this study advances the idea of multimodal optimal distinctiveness in constructing entrepreneurial narratives and has implications for cultivating a more inclusive venue for resource access and innovation participation.
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