Tom Lyon received a 2022 ONE Distinguished Scholar Award. He prepared these remarks to share with the ONE Community.I was unable to attend AOM this year, but I was deeply honored to be chosen for this award, even though compared to Alfie Marcus I am a bit of a latecomer to the ONE community. You have become a key academic home for me over the past decade, and I greatly value our shared commitment to a sustainable planet. In addition to my research, many of you know me through my leadership roles at the Erb Institute at University of Michigan and the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability.
Like many of the early scholars in the corporate sustainability space, my path has been a long strange trip, as the Deadheads would say. Before graduate school, I worked at a public utility and then for the National Audubon Society; energy and environment have been lifelong interests. My PhD from Stanford was in Engineering-Economic Systems, and my early research was on the regulation of energy utilities, applying a political-economy perspective that I learned from my advisor, Roger Noll. That work showed how utility investments and contracts could manipulate the regulatory environment and shift risks from investors to ratepayers. My research hit a crucial turning point one fateful day when my colleague at Indiana University, John Maxwell, walked down the hall to ask if I had read the latest Federal Reserve newsletter. I confessed that I had not. The lead article was about the Council of Great Lakes Industries, which was encouraging its members to reduce their discharges of pollutants into the Great Lakes below the level required by law. This struck us both as puzzling, since the conventional wisdom in economics at the time was that firms should do only enough to meet regulatory requirements. We set out on a quest to understand this phenomenon, and developed a theory that again focused on how corporate investments could manipulate the regulatory environment. This led to “Self-Regulation and Social Welfare: The Political Economy of Corporate Environmentalism,” Journal of Law and Economics (2000), which showed that voluntary approaches like self-regulation could enhance social welfare if consumers were well-informed and companies could make credible commitments. A series of related papers in economic journals followed quickly, along with a book from Cambridge University Press, Corporate Environmentalism and Public Policy (2004).
That book helped me land a new job at the University of Michigan, which was attractive in part because of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise. Andy Hoffman joined Michigan that same year, and we excitedly set about building up the Institute. Around that time, I began to realize that many of the citations to my work were coming from outside of economics, and I first became aware of the ONE Division. I took over the Directorship of the Erb Institute in 2006, and in partnership with Andy created the Erb Postdoctoral Fellows program, which has ushered many ONE members into academic careers, including Haitao Yin (Shanghai Jiao Tong), Sara Soderstrom (Michigan), Katy DeCelles (Rotman), Lianne Lefsrud (Alberta), Judith Walls (St. Gallen), Nardia Haigh (U. Mass, Boston), Jocelyn Leitzinger (U. Illinois, Chicago), Panikos Georgallis (Amsterdam), Todd Schifeling (Temple), Katrin Heucher (Groningen), and Nicholas Poggioli (an Alfie Marcus student now at Appalachian State).
In 2008, Mike Lenox (then at Duke, soon to move to University of Virginia) proposed the creation of a sister organization to ONE, the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), with the goal of further elevating rigorous research in this space. ARCS has an institutional membership model, unlike the purely individual membership model of ONE, and I was delighted to host the very first ARCS conference at Michigan in 2009. We had a special ceremony that year to honor John Ehrenfeld and three of his PhD students who have gone on to become leaders in the field: Andy Hoffman, Andy King, and Mike Lenox. ARCS has blossomed over the years, and offers an intimate annual conference away from the hubbub of AOM, which facilitates intensive dialogue. Under the remarkable leadership of Oana Branzei at the Ivey School, we also co-sponsor the annual Ivey/ARCS Sustainability Academy. I just stepped down from 5 years as President of ARCS, very pleased to leave it in the capable next-generation hands of Caroline Flammer.
On the research front, my focus at Michigan shifted to the role of information and communication in corporate sustainability strategy. I wrote a series of empirical papers examining the impact of various information disclosure policies and environmental ratings systems, and all of those programs made a difference. It was clear that information was central to the success of sustainability initiatives. But because information disclosure is strategic for firms, I then wrote a series of theoretical and empirical papers with colleagues John Maxwell, Eun-Hee Kim, and Wren Montgomery on strategic information provision, focusing on phenomena such as astroturf lobbying, greenwash, brownwash, and tweetjacking.
My sanguine view of corporate self-regulation gradually eroded as the power of greenwash and corporate lobbying became more evident. I turned attention to the power of NGOs to call out misinformation, and to offer environmental certifications through independent organizations. I organized a Michigan conference on environmental NGOs that led to the book Good Cop, Bad Cop: Environmental NGOs and their Strategies towards Business. Another Michigan conference led to a 2020 special issue of Organization & Environment on “Social Movements and Private Environmental Governance.” I also published theoretical papers on competition between ecolabels sponsored by NGOs and by industry trade associations.
Ultimately, no private governance solution has the power to implement sector- or economy-wide solutions, which are critical for grand challenges such as climate change. Unlike what the “free market environmentalists” will tell you, we need sound public policy. In 2018, with 12 of my closest colleagues from ARCS, I published a paper in California Management Review entitled “CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics”; it won their Best Article award. The article argued that companies should not receive brownie points for taking small green actions in public while lobbying against green public policies in private, and that stakeholder groups need to pay a lot more attention to corporate political activity. I am editing a follow-up book from Cambridge University Press, simply titled Corporate Political Responsibility. It is also having impact through a new initiative at the Erb Institute, the Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce. We have a large set of resources online (just Google “erb cprt”) that we hope you will find of value.
In the end, as Alfie remarked, the most rewarding part of this long strange trip has been the opportunity to work with like-minded colleagues to open up a path for junior scholars to succeed studying corporate sustainability. I have written countless promotion and tenure letters for colleagues in the ONE and ARCS communities. Other parts of that long-term effort include PDWs and paper sessions organized through ONE, the Erb postdoc program, and the Ivey/ARCS Sustainability Academy. The teamwork involved has been successful. Being a scholar of corporate sustainability no longer requires a long, strange trip through academia; it’s seen as a perfectly legitimate path. That is something for us all to celebrate, before we get back to tackling the many grand challenges that remain.
-- Tom Lyon
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Nicholas Poggioli (poe-JOE-lee) (he/him)
Assistant Professor of Management
Appalachian State University Walker College of Business
Email:
poggiolin@appstate.edu | Phone: 828-262-8122
Zoom:
https://appstate.zoom.us/my/nicholaspoggioliWebsite:
https://www.nicholaspoggioli.com------------------------------