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The purpose of this paper is to examine the rhetorical strategies used by organizations in support of propriety judgments concerning their products.

The approach taken entails discourse and rhetorical analysis of texts produced by leading firms in the bottled water industry, and by the industry’s trade association, surrounding issues of sustainability.

The analysis reveals rhetorical strategies invoked by firms to legitimate their economic, environmental and social performance.

This paper’s primary contribution is to research that informs the discursive aspects of legitimacy. As well, this study contributes to our nascent understanding of the microfoundations of sustainability.

Our knowledge of how organizations use different discursive strategies in support of legitimacy is relatively underdeveloped. By examining rhetorical strategies used in support of propriety judgments concerning organizations’ environmental, social and economic legitimacy, this study begins to fill gaps in our understanding.

This paper aims to consider the legitimacy challenges faced by hybrid organizations, examining the narrative strategies hybrids use in responding to these challenges and offering a framework for managers to consider in their choice of narratives.

A narrative analysis of texts addressing the legitimacy of the business models used by four hybrid organizations is conducted.

The results of the analysis suggest that the nature of conflicting stakeholder demands – centered on goals or means – is an integral factor influencing hybrids’ choice of narrative strategies to emphasize distinctiveness or conformity.

This paper adds to extant research examining the challenges hybrid organizations face and emphasizes that the choice of narrative strategies is an important factor hybrids must consider when managing legitimacy. Generalizability is a notable limitation of the case approach; the authors suggest areas for future research to address this limitation.

The research offers a practical framework for hybrids’ leaders, as they manage legitimacy, choosing to emphasize distinctiveness or conformity in the face of conflicts regarding goals or means.

By studying the legitimacy challenges faced by hybrid organizations, this study can form a more complete view of legitimation, encompassing different types of enterprises offering distinct value propositions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the rhetorical strategies used by organizations when the legitimacy of their products is challenged by stakeholders’ sustainability concerns.

The approach involves rhetorical analysis of texts addressing the implications of genetically modified foods for sustainability. The rhetorical logic (pathos, logos, or ethos) and discursive intent (promotion of validity or propriety) invoked by leading seed producers to address stakeholders’ sustainability concerns was identified.

Ethos was found to be used to address validity judgments, pathos to address propriety judgments, and logos to address both validity and propriety judgments. The mechanisms through which rhetorical logic supports discursive intent are described.

This study contributes to a growing body of research at the intersection of discourse and legitimacy, and reveals the rhetorical strategies used to address stakeholders’ sustainability concerns. Future research can build on the study’s findings by examining the effectiveness of distinct rhetorical strategies in building legitimacy.

We lack a complete understanding of how legitimacy is discursively constructed when stakeholder concerns, such as those around sustainability, threaten an organization’s legitimacy. This paper’s examination of rhetorical logic and discursive intent advances this understanding.

This paper aims to compare the emergence and evolution of organizational fields through an analysis of the life insurance industries in two large emerging markets. Using institutional theory as a conceptual framework, we compare the regulatory, cognitive and normative dimensions of the life insurance industry in China and India.

The authors introduce a qualitative variation of the country institutional profile (CIP) that has been traditionally implemented as a quantitative analytical tool used to describe differences in national environments. This newly proposed methodology captures the socially embedded aspects of the phenomenon more completely than commonly employed survey-based methodology.

This analysis leads to a three-dimensional typology of constructs and themes within each national environment. These themes include the importance of regulation and protectionism, the domestic savings culture, family support structures and human capital development within the industry. The authors conclude by comparing these typologies to consider the implications for studying change in organizational fields across contexts.

As the authors reflect on the evolution of organizational fields, they demonstrate how the interplay of historical factors and new global norms results in a negotiated stance between compliance with new norms and allegiance to local interests. In terms of methodological contribution, we show how the socially embedded aspects of the examined phenomenon are explored more completely by the proposed qualitative CIP than through its quantitative variation. This approach and the analysis illustrate a complex interplay of local and global norms within a selected industry that may be missed by other research methods.

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been gaining support for the role it plays in employee outcomes, such as organizational identification (OID), the view of CSR from a social identity perspective is underdeveloped. This conceptual chapter explores the role of social identity processes grounded in organizational justice to develop a model of CSR attributions and the moderating role these attributions play in organizational member outcomes. CSR is understood as the relational processes happening with stakeholders, and these relationships engage specific organizational identity orientations. The social identity process flows from there, resulting in CSR attributions including strategic, relational, and virtuous. Using social identity, organizational identity, and organizational justice, this chapter makes two specific contributions: a CSR attribution typology grounded in organizational justice and the moderating impact of these attributions between activated justice dimensions and resulting organizational member outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the institutionalization of screening and metrics in conventional finance and reflect upon the implications for Islamic finance.

The study involves the analysis of archival data, interviews and fieldwork with current impact investors in North America and the European Union to trace the historical development of impact investing screening and metrics.

First, the paper explores how conventional investors have applied positive and negative screens in the creation of their values/mission-based investment strategies. This is followed by a historical analysis of the development and implementation of impact metrics and regulatory frameworks that influenced the growth of conventional impact investing. The possible benefits of learning from these experiences for the Islamic finance industry are then considered. The paper concludes with an analysis of the potential value of mission/values-based investing for the economic development of the Middle East and North Africa region.

Though not a comprehensive study of institutionalization, this study supports recent calls for more intentional use of capital for blended returns within Islamic markets. To support these initiatives, it provides scholars and practitioners with multiple recommended points of entry into this growing market.

There has been scant organizational research examining the development of best practices within the impact investment community and how these might be applied to other contexts such as Islamic finance.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.