Event Details

Dr Massimo Contrafatto presents a recent paper on the emergence of sustainability reporting in a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

This event has been postponed - please check our social media and website for details of a new date (in 2023).

Nowadays organizations operate in pluralistic and increasingly more complex institutional environments, which are characterized by the presence of multiple and often competing institutional logics (ILs). In the management and organisation literature calls have been made for understanding how these multiple/competing ILs work on the ground and to examine how organizations respond. We draw on the theory of institutional logics (Quattrone, 2021) to investigate how a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise managed the demands and expectations of two conflicting logics: a blended logic of socialist market economy (Logic A) and an emerging CSR/sustainability logic (Logic B)". The empirical evidence was collected through: (i) a six-month participant observation of sustainability reporting process in 2014, (ii) a series of formal semi-structured interviews with 25 individuals involved in the reporting, (iii) an analysis of previous CSR reports, the archival documentary (e.g. minutes of several corporate-level meetings chaired by senior management), (iv) numerous government’s official narratives, announcement of rules and guidelines, speech of senior politicians in the national congress which could affect the sustainability activities in Chinese SOEs over the past years; and (v) another three follow-up site visits were made in 2015, 2017 and 2019, respectively, including further interviews and observations.