Different forms of stakeholder pressures drive different environmental strategies in organizations. This article differentiates between internal and external normative stakeholder pressures to test their potentially unique effects on environmental strategies. The findings suggest that internal, normative stakeholder pressures primarily drive substantive commitments to environmental practices, reflecting an internalized, voluntary commitment to the natural environment and dedication to environmental leadership by the firm. External, normative pressures instead primarily drive symbolic commitments to environmental practices, aimed at managing the image of the organization to establish and reinforce an appearance of commitment to the natural environment. This novel perspective accounts for the institutionally plural contexts of organizations and their environments, in which internal pressures directly drive substantive environmental commitments and external pressures drive symbolic responses. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Virtually unheard of 30 years ago, collaborations involving environmental NGOs and businesses are now common and are increasingly being used to address sustainability issues in supply chains. We argue that a supply chain perspective is instrumental for collaborative NGOs in helping them to understand environmental impacts, interorganizational dynamics, and optimal collaborative partners and tactics. We apply a framework that integrates three predominant social capital theories to cross‐sector partnerships to explain how three dimensions of social capital, individually and in interaction, may create strategic value for NGOs who seek to improve the environmental performance of companies through collaboration. Finally, we survey the nature of the progress that has (and has not) been made through cross‐sector partnerships and offer suggestions for how social capital may be deployed to accelerate change.

This article traces the strategic initiatives that Walmart undertook over the last decade to implement its ambitious vision of selling more sustainable products. This effort has been characterized by a gradual shift away from customer-facing initiatives aimed at labeling sustainable products toward supplier-facing initiatives targeted at improving environmental or social performance without raising customer prices. It highlights the role of institutional intermediaries, transaction costs, and experiential learning in shaping firms' capabilities to translate ambitious sustainability goals into operable, mass-market initiatives.

Using a social movement perspective, we propose a framework that includes nonprofit actors as members of supply chains in a context that we call sustainable supply chain facilitation, particularly within multi-stakeholder supply chain sustainability initiatives. In this framework, certain nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) work alongside other supply chain firms, going beyond technical roles to serve as coordinators, conveners, organizers, brokers, and negotiators who facilitate multiparty agreement on sustainability issues within and across supply chains. We describe a set of roles consisting of third-party facilitators (3PF), fourth-party facilitators (4PF), and fifth-party facilitators (5PF) serving in increasingly strategic roles with increasing numbers of actors, and with increasing potential for co-creation of value in global supply chains. Reframing nongovernmental organizations as members of supply chains instead of outsiders provides a dramatically different perspective. This explicit acknowledgement of membership can help business and NGO managers to rethink their own roles and motivations and to find collaborative solutions in the steady transition to more sustainable supply chains.

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