Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
five groups of stakeholders--corporate govern-
ment stakeholders, internal economic stakehold-
ers, external economic stakeholders, regulatory
stakeholders, and social external stakeholders.
Companies could benefit from building better re-
lationships with primary stakeholders. This could
result in increased shareholder wealth by helping
firms to develop intangible, valuable assets that
would function as sources of competitive advan-
tage (Hillman and Keim, 2001). For example,
investiture in stakeholder relations may engender
customer or supplier loyalty, reduce turnover
among employees, or improve firm performance
(Hillman and Keim, 2001). Moreover, from an
institutional perspective, the firm can facilitate
learning and the creation and dissemination of
value-producing knowledge (Hillman and Keim,
2001). By developing longer-term relationships
with primary stakeholders, firms expand the set
of value-creating exchanges with these groups
beyond what would be possible with interactions
limited to market transactions. Relational transac-
tions may result in value creation (Sharma and
Vredenburg, 1998).
strategy theories could not be directly utilized in
the context of IS. By adopting the resource-based
view theory and incorporating its concepts with
those of modern institutional theory, we came up
with three recommended Green IT strategies. In
this study, Green IT is described as the systematic
application of environmental sustainability crite-
ria to the design, production, sourcing, use, and
disposal of IT technical infrastructure, as well as
within the human and managerial components of
the IT infrastructure in order to reduce IT, business
processes, and supply chain-related emissions and
waste, and to improve energy efficiency (Molla
et al
., 2009, p.4).
An organization's environmental strategy is
highly dependent on its ability to distribute re-
sources toward developing its ability to allocate
resources into the further development of basic
strategic competencies (Aragon-Corea, 1998).
The previous study conducted by Darnall and
Edwards (2006) also posited that organizations
with higher capacities and greater access to re-
sources enjoy lower environmental adoption costs.
When resources enable a firm to establish either
a lower cost structure or to demand a premium
price for its products or services, the opportunity
for superior profits exists (Porter, 1980). In the
context of the resource-based perspective, tech-
nological resources are process-specific ITs that
are utilized to support specific processes (Ray
et al
., 2004). Technology resources refer to the
set of well-known computing technologies in an
industry that are available from factor markets
and are understood to exert a positive impact on
the performance of specific processes (Ray
et al
.,
2004). In accordance with the research of Lucas
(2009), we identified three key strategic resources
of Green IT: IT infrastructure, IS human and or-
ganizational capital, and IS partnership quality.
More effective alignments between business and
IT strategies have been shown to occur in situations
in which the strategy creation processes increased
the dialogue between business and IT managers,
A Recommendation of
Green IT Strategy
As shown in Table 1 (p. 6-8), the majority of the
relevant literature has explored and constructed en-
vironmental strategies in a general sense. Although
these authors have utilized a variety of different
phrases to describe different environmental strat-
egies, their strategic formulations all fall some-
where on a continuum between a reactive strategy
(companies choose not to react to environmental
issues) to a proactive strategy (companies become
involved in environmental activities in a variety
of ways). To the best of our knowledge, there has
been no study thus far conducted to evaluate and
generate new strategies in a technological (Green
IT) context exclusively from the institutional per-
spective. Considering that IT strategy is derived
