Introduction
‘
Well, we can’
t really imagine why you would (…)
spend about like 50 to 100 thousand on doing all the certification work because the public assumes that you are clean and that you are complying.’ This quote from the empirical study presented in this paper reflects the remarkable advice given by an audit firm to an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), stating that an environmental certification would not be worthwhile in their situation. Contrary to firms that are often questioned about their sustainable conduct, this quote anecdotally demonstrates the public’s assumption that advocacy NGOs ‘walk their talk,’ even though supporting evidence about the NGO’s conduct is lacking. This points to an intriguing and somewhat delicate subject of whether and how NGOs acting as sustainability advocates are driven to embed sustainability in their own internal operations. This subject is of particular interest since it is widely accepted that NGOs are among the main drivers leading firms to self-regulate and adopt a sustainable approach in their operations (e.g., Campbell
2007; Waddock
2008). However, the study of drivers and barriers of sustainable conduct has focused more on firms (e.g., Bansal
2005; Bansal and Roth
2000; Delgado-Ceballos et al.
2012) than on NGOs.
This study addresses NGOs in the context of sustainability. NGOs are ‘private, not-for-profit organizations that aim to serve particular societal interests by focusing advocacy and/or operational efforts on social, environmental, political and economic goals’ (cf. Teegen et al.
2004) rather than profit maximization. In this paper, we focus on a specific type of NGOs that parallels to campaigning organizations (Handy
1990), which we refer to as NGOs acting as sustainability advocates. The number of NGOs—and their influence—has grown significantly; therefore, NGOs have been recognized as influential key actors in an international business context (Kourula and Laasonen
2010; Teegen et al.
2004; Waddock
2008).
The role of NGOs as watchdogs of large multinational corporations and their advocacy role in developing good practices are well established in the literature (e.g., Domeisen and Hulm
2006; Haack et al.
2012; Kong et al.
2002; Valente
2012; Van Cranenburgh et al.
2013).
However, when we shift the focus from NGOs as sustainability advocates to NGOs as responsible players themselves, it appears that information on NGOs’ internal policies and practices is incomplete, or even absent in some cases (Simaens and Koster
2013), and in the literature there is a lack of attention dedicated to NGOs’ internal sustainable practices [apart from initial research on NGOs’ sustainability reporting (Simaens and Koster
2013), accountability and communicative action (Dhanani and Connolly
2015), and limited evidence of sustainable practices by NGOs (e.g., Low and Davenport
2009; Wiser et al.
2001)].
It is of interest to understand NGOs’ responsibilities like sustainable internal conduct (cf. Kourula and Laasonen
2010), and here lies the novelty of the paper, as the role played by these advocates in terms of sustainability differs from that played by firms and even other types of NGOs, because sustainability is at the core of their mission. They face potential scrutiny regarding whether they ‘walk the talk’ internally; that is, practicing what they tell others to do while being advocates for a more sustainable world. As Fassin (
2009, p. 503) notes when focusing on the ethical evaluation of actions undertaken by NGO’s toward ‘victim’ corporations, the way ‘NGOs themselves act does not always live up to the principles they advocate.’ Hence, advocacy NGOs face specific institutional influences and have idiosyncrasies worth studying. Research with a focus on the position and drive of international NGOs, and especially the NGOs acting as sustainability advocates, can reveal novel insights into the influences that in a broader sense encourage other advocacy or advisory organizations to ‘walk their talk’. We address the following research question:
What are the drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct of NGOs that are sustainability advocates?
Sustainable conduct includes the triple-bottom-line perspective (Elkington
1998) via the integration of people, planet, and profit criteria into the culture, strategy, and operations of organizations (cf. Kleindorfer et al.
2005). For the purpose of this paper, we focus on behavior that intends to reduce environmental and social impacts, also referred to as ‘weak sustainability’ (Roome
2011).
Institutional theory is apt as a lens to study drivers and barriers to sustainability in research, since it recognizes that institutions are sets of rules and practices [like formal regulations, social norms and obligations, and shared understandings and common beliefs (Scott
2008)] that shape the meaning and the perceived appropriateness of social behavior. These regulations, social norms, and shared beliefs strongly influence the way organizations think and act. Using institutional theory as a lens of analysis helps us understand why organizations like NGOs act the way they do, including its drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct. Thus, in our study we build on institutional theory and then identify that ‘walking the talk’ is a specific situation of complexity and potentially conflicting demands that specifically match the perspective of institutional complexity (Greenwood et al.
2011; Kodeih and Greenwood
2013). Institutional complexity is rooted in institutional theory and focuses on consequences of incompatible prescriptions from formal regulations, social norms and obligations, and shared understandings and common beliefs (Scott
2008), as well as on broader prescriptions beyond those institutional influences.
We explore multiple cases of leading international advocacy NGOs that target sustainability in their mission and advocacy work: international human rights and international environmental NGOs.
We uncover elements that are relevant in institutionally complex situations of ‘walking the talk’ and add to research on institutional complexity with this specific walk-the-talk context. We find the role played in particular by cultural-cognitive and normative factors as drivers of sustainable conduct in the context of advocacy NGOs. Furthermore, we find that these organizations face trade-offs when balancing investments in their advocacy missions with investments in sustainable operations, reflecting ethical dilemmas. In a broader sense, the novelty of this research is that it elucidates the way advocacy or advisory organizations cope, in situations of institutional complexity (Greenwood et al.
2011; Kodeih and Greenwood
2013), with conflicting institutional demands between their role-model function of ‘walking the talk’ themselves (processes) and accomplishing their advocacy mission (consequences).
Results
In this section, we develop an exploratory analysis across the ten cases, focused on our research question: What are the drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct of NGOs that are sustainability advocates?
Sustainable internal conduct varies considerably across the ten organizational units included in our research. Remarkable differences are found internally among the sustainability approaches of different offices, and even among offices of the same NGO. Each office operates quite independently, generally without strict central guidelines or imperatives, as shown in methods section in Table
1.
Table
3 summarizes the presence of a sustainability policy and an authors’ analysis of the character and perceived strength of the institutional drivers toward sustainable conduct.
Table 3
Drivers to sustainable conduct per organizational unit (indicative)
As an example of how the drivers given in Table
3 are categorized, we briefly illustrate the motivation of ENV I-UK. In this particular case, we categorized institutional influences as (i) nonexistent/unreported regulative drive; (ii) a major cultural-cognitive drive; and (iii) a medium normative drive. First, in general,
regulative drivers were insignificant (please refer to “
Appendix 2”), but in the specific case of ENV I-UK, this type of driver was not encountered or reported at all. Second, in relation to the
cultural-
cognitive drive, ENV I-UK reflected first of all both management and staff involvement, and next to that a strong intrinsic motivation and taken-for-granted position: Our interviewees indicated and also illustrated that their staff are ‘committed and passionate’ about sustainability. Finally, the
normative drive was also encountered, although less prominently. Firstly, it was, for instance, reflected by the fact that funders’ expectations on how to spend money were acknowledged and taken into account, and secondly by a small review of sustainable internal conduct, which the organization made available publicly. A third sign of a normative drive was the struggle around which norms apply to judge what products could be considered ‘sustainable’ (like the Carbon Trust that rates ‘kettles’).
Although organizational practices differed among the ten advocacy NGOs, our cross-case analyses revealed commonalities in the underlying complexity. On the one hand, regulative drivers were insignificant, while both cultural-cognitive and normative drivers were encountered and manifested mainly in a taken-for-granted attitude from the staff and an awareness of others’ expectations. On the other hand, trade-offs between advocacy work and work on sustainable internal conduct were also found.
These findings derived from three core concepts emerging from the raw data (see Fig.
1). First, a legitimacy-seeking stance—both internally and externally—related to the three institutional pillars (cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative); second, trade-offs faced by NGOs; and finally, the organizations’ immunity. These concepts are further explained next.
Cultural-Cognitive Drivers
The cultural-cognitive pillar was a determining factor and driver for the advocacy NGO offices’ internal sustainability of operations. The sense of ‘taken for granted’ (‘of course we strive to work in a sustainable way’) was commonly mentioned in the interviews as an important driver for management and employees to behave in a sustainable way. The cultural-cognitive drivers included the shared motivation of the organization’s employees to behave in a sustainable way as ‘the way we do these things,’ which is demonstrated in the example of ENV II-UK:
Some mornings… our boilers are so inefficient… you know… the temperature is about 16 degrees… and we have to wait for it to gradually warm up… Even though boilers come on you know mid-night to start… and yet we hardly have any complaints because people know that the alternative is to buy new boilers or to have the boilers on 24 h a day and they know that’s not sustainable.
A personal will and intrinsic drive played a key role in decisions concerning sustainability, indicating a search for
internal legitimacy. For example, ENV I-UK indicated that ‘
people who work for these organizations are committed and passionate, so there is already a level of motivation that may be higher.’ SOC-UK indicated that ‘
our employees are very keen, very keen, and you would expect that because of the field they work in…
this is just kind of the nature of the person they are…
so they are very keen…’.
The ‘taken-for-granted’ approach appeared to be somehow skewed toward the organizational mission. Although all organizations acknowledged social and environmental aspects as part of sustainability, there was evidence that sustainability aspects that were closely related to their organizational mission were prioritized. An explicit awareness of this focus was mentioned in five cases. For instance, SOC-UK mentioned: ‘…purchasing decisions are skewed. We do skew heavily on the labor standards… other organizations might skew towards environmental standards, depending on where they are.’
In addition, the way in which practices started to develop was mentioned in some cases, pointing to a natural development where sustainable practices spontaneously evolved and were naturally supported by management. These processes confirm the taken-for-granted feeling, as illustrated by ENV I-NL: ‘it was not really defined as a policy… it was a way of working, which was really into the minds and hearts of everybody.’
Almost all organizations gave evidence that they looked at other NGOs’ internal conduct to learn from it or to benchmark their own behavior. Seven organizations evidenced an even more active exchange of practices with local peers or other NGOs. As noted by SOC-UK, ‘my peers… all the facilities managers who are running buildings, we are quite often going into each other’s buildings just to have a look at what they are doing (…) and we want to show off our building too.’ SOC-UK also highlighted that ‘… it’s interesting and it’s good to be able to share… share knowledge, but there is quite a lot of pride in that as well…’. Contacts with local peers to exchange sustainability practices in general outweighed contacts and benchmarks with other offices within their own NGO.
Finally, all organizations had in common the fact that when it came to reporting on sustainability—as part of their sustainable conduct—, cultural-cognitive elements did not seem to play a role. None of the units provided evidence that sustainability reporting was something taken for granted that naturally needed to happen, whereas such cultural-cognitive drivers were generally in place for sustainable behavior in varying strengths across the organizational units.
Normative Drivers
Next to cultural-cognitive elements, normative drivers played an important role for the analyzed offices. There were expectations and values set by others for the organization, which were a sort of social obligation. It was as if these advocacy NGOs were looking for
external legitimacy. In two cases, organizations proactively asked stakeholders for their opinion, and members’ expectations were frequently mentioned, such as in this example by SOC-UK:
People give us money for human rights… and they don’t really want too many diverts away from that… although equally our members want to see that we are environmentally sustainable and although we are not actively damaging the environment I think they would be upset if they heard that we are doing stuff that was damaging to the environment….
There was a sense of perceived vulnerability as they felt they needed to ‘walk the talk’. The NGO’s own mission played a key role in relation to external stakeholders’ expectations about its sustainable conduct. For the outside world, the organization’s mission would be reflected implicitly by the organization’s internal behavior. This would reveal its mission as an expectation toward the NGO itself. All organizations mentioned this need to practice what they told others to do, since not doing so was related to potential reputational damage, as stated by ENV I-Germ:
ENV I is the leading environmental organization, so the pressure so to speak on walk the talk might be higher than on the Doctors Without Frontiers… We are pretty much on the extreme end of trying to be very pure, independent and that also probably makes it different, makes us potentially very fragile, so we need to focus a lot on walk the talk and on being environmentally correct, just in case anybody asks. We cannot afford anything like that to happen to make the headlines of the news. So that makes us probably different from other NGOs.
In needing to ‘walk the talk,’ some advocacy campaigns even caused an internal ‘wake-up call’. This is what makes advocacy NGOs so unique compared to firms and even other NGOs. Sometimes the campaigns themselves instigate internal changes without any explicit external request. For instance, ENV I-Germ used a campaign against a company using a coal power plant as a trigger for their own conduct, even though the power consumption of an NGO office was modest in absolute terms.
Furthermore, there were sustainability standards that the offices selected to comply with. Those standards set criteria and consequently drove internal conduct. Some organizations chose standards (norms) with which to comply as a guideline, while some developed their own way of working. Three types of external standards were found: [1] at a product level in all organizations, standards and labels were found for the use of, for instance, FSC-certified paper, MSC fish, or Fair Trade products; [2] at an organizational level in only one case, international certifiable management standards like ISO 14001 (environmental management) were found, whereas one other organization (ENV I-NL) started to use ISO 26000, which are guidelines for social responsibility; and [3] reporting standards on either the international or national level.
Regarding the other element of sustainable conduct, drivers to sustainability reporting were in place to a lesser extent than drivers to sustainable practices. Still, the ‘walk-the-talk’ pressure was being mentioned by the interviewees, since NGOs ask businesses to be transparent about their operations.
Regulative Drivers
Examples of the regulative pillar were rarely found in the interviews. In general, regulations did not seem to play a significant role in any of the organizational units.
Institutional Barriers
When it came to institutional influences that withheld NGOs from sustainable behavior, all interviewed organizations mentioned compromises or trade-offs because of competing activities such as the NGOs’ main advocacy work. Rather than encountering resistance against sustainable conduct, it was the setting of priorities that in some cases slowed down efforts to enhance sustainability in internal operations.
First, cultural-cognitive influences were an important driver to sustainable practices in general, but at the same time they were seen as limiters of further sustainable conduct. Hence, although interviewees indicated that employees in their organization were disciplined and motivated to behave in a sustainable way, some exceptions were mentioned where it was challenging for the organizations to motivate staff. The cultural-cognitive drive varied per organization, but the exceptions to a sustainable conduct driven by cultural-cognitive reasons were generally those cases where convenience, efficiency, or existing ways of working on advocacy work would be compromised if more sustainable practices had to be adopted. For instance, ENV II-INT indicated that flights were still necessary to do their advocacy work: ‘flights is the biggest CO2 emissions that we do have and it is a problem, but we are a global organization and we need to travel and meet people and see projects and plan the future. ’
Some limitations to sustainable conduct within an organization resulted from scarcity of resources and (financial) accountability for expenses. Trade-offs needed to be made, as mentioned by SOC-UK: ‘obviously, we can spend our resources on a Middle East campaign for human rights or measuring carbon emissions from our business travel and you know… that’s a real… that’s a real choice…’. In many reported trade-offs, supporters’ expectations were mentioned. ENV I-INT indicated that they could not justify ‘having a completely beautiful single dancing green lovely office, when all of our supporters’ money has gone to doing that, as opposed to campaigning, so it is a very real trade-off…’.
Second, normative influences, which have been reported as important drivers, also had a decelerator role. In fact, norms and expectations of external stakeholders had a distinct influence on the trade-off between internal sustainability conduct and advocacy work. For instance, some organizations felt the pressure from donors in the use of money (for example, ‘our supporters want us to use the best products but they also don’t want us to spend too much money on them (…) so we have use that wisely as well…,’ GP UK). The concern about making the best use of the supporters’ money was present in some interviews, referring to the need to balance advocacy work with their own sustainable conduct that often requires some upfront investment (such as efficient facilities and heating systems or water and energy savers). At the same time, being organizations with sustainability-related missions and working on the ‘good cause,’ NGOs seemed to have natural legitimacy. Stakeholders considered it logical that NGOs behaved in a sustainable way and thus did not scrutinize them on those aspects. As stated by ENV II-NL, ‘We think that people see us as a good example’; similarly, SOC-INT stated: ‘there is no one telling us that we need to improve… we need to say that to ourselves.’ The quite explicit example in this respect, quoted in the first lines of this paper, comes from ENV I-GM, which wanted to be certified with ISO 14000, but was advised to spend their money otherwise because they were trusted anyway.
It is important to note that none of the NGOs proved to be seriously questioned by external stakeholders about their sustainable conduct, and this may have reduced the need to emphasize internal sustainability. This lack of scrutiny was confirmed by the findings from our secondary data search. Out of the 1145 articles published between 2005 and 2010, only about 60 referred to some sort of criticism toward the NGOs, and they hardly specifically referred to the NGOs’ own sustainable conduct. Rather, they referred mostly to criticism regarding the way these organizations developed their mission, such as their organizational approach to the issues addressed and their disregard to law when campaigning (mostly ENV I), disregard of national legal and social context (mostly SOC), or issuing of misleading information (all three NGOs).
There were a few examples specifically related to sustainability, such as the ones in 2005 featuring ENV I, involving a ship that hit a coral reef in the Philippines, and a polemic prize (trips to ‘paradise’ destinations) created by the USA office for those recruiting new members or campaigning against nuclear power. This prize was criticized by other offices, reinforcing the different approaches of offices around the world. In three other articles, some reference was made to the potential indirect social impacts to the local communities caused by the NGOs’ campaigns, such as loss of jobs.
Finally, the regulative institutional factors slowing down sustainable practices, just like those driving them, are anecdotal. Only in one case it was mentioned that there were fiscal benefits, where VAT advantages boosted printing magazines instead of sending them by e-mail or making it smaller.
Discussion
Advocacy NGOs are important players that drive other organizations to behave in a sustainable way. This research aims to understand what drives or withholds NGOs to operate in a sustainable way internally and how institutional theory and institutional complexity could explain these drivers or barriers.
For other organizations, a positive relationship has been found between sustainability aspects mentioned in firms’ mission statements and internal practices, such as work–life initiatives (Blair-Loy et al.
2011) or stakeholder management (Bartkus and Glassman
2008). For advocacy NGOs, it can be argued that this relationship between advocacy mission and internal conduct could be even stronger. Our findings disentangle, from an institutional point of view, drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct of NGOs acting as sustainability advocates.
Internal Legitimacy: Taken for Grantedness
A significant internal taken-for-granted motivation was found in the majority of cases, driving sustainable behavior because of its self-evidence for the employees. The wish to behave—in line with the mission—in a sustainable way was indicated to be something natural for most organizations, albeit often biased toward the own mission area (for instance, missions for environment or social conditions or human rights). Yet, there was broad recognition that sustainability outside the mission area was also important. Those ‘natural drivers’ have cultural-cognitive characteristics (Scott
2008) that drive the NGO’s sustainable conduct, encompassing moral motives for sustainable behavior. Contrary to this, previous research shows that for firms, among a broad variety of drivers for sustainable conduct (Aguinis and Glavas
2012; Bansal
2005), the business case of sustainable behavior and maximizing profits often play a major role (Ambec and Lanoie
2008; Campbell
2007; Hopkins et al.
2011; Kiron et al.
2012). Additionally, for organizations that do not have a sustainability-related mission, cultural-cognitive drivers appear to be lower in general (see also Hoejmose and Adrien-Kirby
2012; Walker et al.
2008). In contrast, the NGO representatives in this research indicated, as a key motive, that sustainable behavior was something natural for their organizations which had missions beyond profit maximization. As noted earlier, this intrinsic drive played a key role in decisions concerning sustainability, suggesting a search for internal legitimacy. Based on our findings, the extent to which the sustainability-related mission and advocacy work of NGOs that act in sustainability enhance internal ‘taken for grantedness’ related to the need to internally behave in a sustainable way deserves further exploration.
External Legitimacy: Perceived Vulnerability and Immunity
Next to the cultural-cognitive influences, versatile normative influences were encountered coming from the mission, characterized by a distinct interplay of influences which were specific for those advocacy NGOs (expectations, external values of members, for instance). Two important contrasting influences determine the effect of the normative pillar in the search for external legitimacy, which urges the organizations to comply with expectations and norms of stakeholders who act outside the organization. These are what we name here as ‘perceived vulnerability’ and ‘immunity’.
Related to the ‘perceived vulnerability,’ all NGO offices perceived that their sustainability-related work and mission increased expectations from others regarding their own conduct. Thus, there were specific norms with which to comply because of their sustainability-related mission. As it was often mentioned, they needed to ‘walk the talk’. However, the organizations indicated that they had not really been questioned or challenged on internal sustainable behavior on a large scale, as confirmed by our document analysis of international newspapers. Considering this lack of active scrutiny, the ‘need-to-walk-the-talk-perception’ points to a sense of exposure to potential scrutiny, which we introduce as the perceived vulnerability of the organization’s legitimacy.
From an institutional perspective, this perceived vulnerability tends to be a normative influence (Scott
2008), since the NGOs own advocacy work and norms they apply to others are now perceived as norms that others might apply to the advocacy NGO itself. This perception drives sustainability higher up the NGOs’ agenda. Hence, the norms NGOs apply to others seem to have a boomerang function. A clear representation of this boomerang effect comes from campaign work, which in some cases directly urged the NGOs to look at their own conduct. In the case of ENV I, it attacked a global internet service provider with regard to the provider’s energy sources, and this created an internal mandate for renewable energy sources. The organization first created their advocacy campaign for other organizations and then reacted to their own campaign as an internal wake-up call.
Our findings suggest that the sustainability-related mission and advocacy work sharpens notions of perceived vulnerability. For advocacy NGOs in the area of sustainability, we find that perceived vulnerability and their legitimacy-seeking approach in turn relate directly to the organization’s intentions to behave in a sustainable way themselves. Further research could explore the extent to which the advocate’s perceived vulnerability influences the drive to conform to the mission internally.
Besides the perceived vulnerability, the second normative influence related to NGOs’ mission was ‘immunity’. The NGOs’ mission-related legitimacy reduces external scrutiny and direct pressures on sustainable internal conduct. By being not-for-profit-oriented, with socially and/or environmentally oriented missions, legitimacy might automatically be perceived to be guaranteed for NGOs. It is externally taken for granted that those NGOs behave in a sustainable way. This legitimacy related to sustainability also reduces the organization’s need to report about internal sustainability, so that resources can be used for other purposes (Jepson
2005).
In general, legitimacy is a potentially important driving force and guidance for business conduct in organizations (Singh et al.
1986). In this specific case, however, legitimacy also provides immunity by reducing the need to pay attention to sustainable internal conduct. This immunity is based on this external taken for grantedness (external legitimacy) and a lack of scrutiny (as also appeared in our secondary data search). Thus, in contrast to the earlier discussion on the potential effects of having a sustainable-related mission and facing perceived vulnerability, this discussion points toward a potential negative influence of the NGOs’ sustainability-related mission on its sustainable internal conduct through immunity.
In fact, this lack of external scrutiny suggests that these NGOs are hardly held accountable for sustainable internal conduct. The role accountability plays in the ethical decision making has been explored in the literature (e.g., Beu et al.
2003; Frink and Klimoski 1998). In their study, Beu et al. (
2003, p. 91) concluded that, despite what literature suggested, those who were not held accountable at all did not necessarily engage in the most unethical behavior. This touches our discussion on immunity of NGOs in the sense that the immunity felt by these organizations may alleviate their drive to engage in more ethical behavior, which in this case is the sustainable internal conduct. This does not mean that they would behave unethically, rather that it may influence the trade-offs discussed in this paper.
As such—and paradoxically enough—the mission seems to have two opposing effects. On the one hand, NGOs perceive that behaving in a sustainable way is implicitly expected by others implicitly and that not doing so brings a real (reputational) risk. Thus, they need to practice what they tell others to do (‘walk the talk’). The notions of sustainable-related mission and perceived vulnerability bring forward institutional forces that place sustainable internal conduct higher on the NGOs’ agenda. On the other hand, that same mission brings legitimacy, which actually seems to prevent NGOs from being scrutinized. Thus, it is mainly the NGOs themselves who feel the need to comply to expectations, rather than stakeholders explicitly asking them to do so. This first effect of ‘walking the talk’ stimulates awareness regarding the sustainability of internal conduct, whereas the second effect of immunity may influence the trade-off between the direct advocacy work and the internal operations in favor of advocacy work.
In order to address this paradoxical influence of an NGO’s mission, we went back to the data and contrasted the ‘we-need-to-walk-the-talk’ effects in fragments coded as drivers with the ‘legitimacy’ effects in fragments coded as (normative) barriers to practice, where the NGO’s mission enhanced legitimacy and thus immunity. We found the strongest explicit evidence for the first effect. Although not (yet) scrutinized, the NGOs want to have ‘their house in order’. The driving effect of ‘walking the talk’ seems to prevail over potential effects of immunity and the lack of external scrutiny.
Institutional Complexity: Trade-Offs
Despite the importance of sustainable internal conduct, the NGOs’ advocacy activities compete for the same scarce internal resources. This forces NGOs to make trade-offs concerning resources like money and time. Following Le Menestrel and de Bettignies (
2002), trade-offs between processes and consequences characterize business ethical dilemmas. The distinctive challenge for the researched NGOs is that in their case the dilemmas are not between economic interests (consequences) and ethical values of business actors (processes) (Le Menestrel and de Bettignies
2002); rather, it is between ‘walking the talk’ themselves (processes) and accomplishing their advocacy mission (consequences).
Two factors should be taken into account for this trade-off. The first factor is what Ossewaarde et al. (
2008, p. 45) referred to as ‘output legitimacy,’ defined as the need ‘to show how they actually materialize their objectives.’ In other words, NGOs need to be able to show the realization of their missions toward stakeholders. Spending time and money on advocacy work might often realize more influential changes than spending those resources on managing internal sustainability. As relatively small organizations, NGOs’ internal operations have only a modest sustainability impact (Unerman and O’Dwyer
2006b), whereas their core advocacy work is often mentioned as a core influential driver for others (e.g., Domeisen and Hulm
2006; Haack et al.
2012; Kong et al.
2002; Valente
2012; Van Cranenburgh et al.
2013). This implies that spending time on internal operations would be less efficient in terms of sustainability than spending time on advocacy work and therefore might be more difficult to justify to stakeholders like sponsors (Ossewaarde et al.
2008).
A second factor for NGOs output legitimacy is their financial accountability (Jepson
2005; Steffek and Hahn
2010). NGOs need to be transparent about the way donations are spent. Internal conduct will not be classified as advocacy work and hence should utilize limited resources.
Enlightened by institutional theory, the ethical dilemmas (O’Fallon and Butterfield
2005) and conflicting institutional demands encountered in this study point at the notion of institutional complexity (Greenwood et al.
2011).
The NGOs’ mission and primary
raison d’
être are located in their direct advocacy work. We find that their mission also drives sustainability of their internal conduct, referring to a kind of role-model function in which they practice what they tell others to do: behave in a sustainable way. This resembles the link made by Fassin (
2009, p. 515) between
raison d’
être and the ‘intrinsically ethical grounds that underpin their (NGOs) foundations.’
The role-model function embodies institutional complexity (Greenwood et al.
2011): conflicting institutional demands inform the organizations regarding how to balance ends (advocacy vs. symbolic function of role model) when means like time and money are scarce (cf. Pache and Santos
2010). The conflicting demands rise between notions of perceived vulnerability and intrinsic drive (for role model) on the one hand, and upward accountability and output responsibility for advocacy work on the other. The need for NGOs to undertake balancing acts is also mentioned by Fassin (
2009) in his work on the ethical evaluation of actions taken by NGOs toward ‘victim’ corporations. The dilemma for those organizations was how to formalize and institutionalize transparency and accountability practices, without losing the essence of their
raison d’
être. This notion of
raison d’
être used by (Fassin
2009) resembles the ‘walk-the-talk’ concept used in this paper, as a NGO’s
raison d’
être should be reflected in the way they act.
Despite the perceived vulnerability, we did not encounter actual cases of external scrutiny. This is in line with the notion that visible organizations may be insulated from (external) organizational pressures (Greenwood et al.
2011; Kraatz and Block
2008). Paradoxically enough, the same type of organizations might be especially targeted by stakeholders, underlining the fragility of their legitimacy (Greenwood et al.
2011).
Conclusions
Our research question addresses the following question: ‘What are the drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct of NGOs that are sustainability advocates?’ Even if these findings can somehow be considered as intuitive when it comes to drivers and barriers per se, our research raises two important aspects to the literature: the notion of trade-offs and of immunity of advocate NGOs, who could be expected to walk their talk, in the context of their sustainability practices.
Our contribution to literature is threefold. First, we study drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct in a novel context, and understudied organizations like advocacy NGOs may reveal novel approaches and insights (cf. Pagell and Shevchenko
2014). We refine and extend knowledge about what may drive or refrain an organization’s sustainable conduct from an institutional point of view. There is a novel and significant position for cultural-cognitive drivers (see Campbell
2007), as well as for the major paradoxical effect of the NGOs’ mission, which stimulates sustainable behavior through ‘perceived vulnerability’ on the one hand, and on the other hand potentially reduces the need to internally behave in a sustainable way through ‘immunity.’ Although part of these results might be idiosyncratic for advocacy NGOs, similar drivers and paradoxical effects might be found in organizations in areas such as fair trade, ethical banking, or political organizations with a sustainability focus. For organizations that do not have a sustainability-related mission, cultural-cognitive drivers appear to be lower in general (see also Hoejmose and Adrien-Kirby
2012; Walker et al.
2008), and there is no role-model function at stake in their trade-offs between their mission and sustainable internal conduct.
Second, the advocacy-related mission and work seem to have a paradoxical effect on internal conduct. On the one hand they are driving force, yet on the other hand their legitimacy may enable trade-offs in favor of primary advocacy work. This is understandable, given a NGO’s advocacy role; however, the public-at-large may actually expect NGOs to also ‘walk the talk’ internally. These trade-offs represent ethical dilemmas faced by managers in these NGOs between processes (ethical internal operations) and consequences (advocacy mission accomplishment). We outline conflicting demands that NGOs face between advocacy work and a symbolic function as (internal and external) role model. We find that organizations respond to those demands in heterogeneous ways, even within the same NGO.
Third, while exploring these themes, this study extends the extant knowledge base on NGOs, which are organizations with missions beyond profit maximization. Our case findings show that their advocacy mission has both normative (perceived need to ‘walk the talk’), cultural-cognitive (taken for granted), and legitimating effects on the NGOs’ internal conduct.
This study had some limitations, such as the fact that it involved a limited number of advocacy NGOs and a limited geographical scope. Furthermore, the study focuses on institutional influences rather than organizational drivers and barriers to sustainable conduct. Future research could further explore the factors identified in this study, including the influence of a sustainable-related mission, perceived vulnerability, and immunity. In addition, organizational characteristics were found to potentially be among the important barriers in the adoption of sustainable conduct (next to institutional drivers and barriers), like organizational size, rented or old office buildings, a limited number of employees, and the internal global governance model (see also Bowen et al.
2001; Gallo and Christensen
2011; Min and Galle
2001). Future research could incorporate these characteristics. Another direction for future research would be a further analysis of organizations’ position toward their role-model function in relation to organizations’ identity (Greenwood et al.
2011; Kodeih and Greenwood
2013).
Finally, our research touches on a hidden form of institutional complexity: the way to cope with a symbolic role-model function. Advocates, consultants, or other organizations that tell (or advise) others what to do need to balance their main activities with this role-model function. A direct managerial implication of this study for those organizations is to appreciate that internal conduct has symbolic value and is more than just the infrastructure for fulfilling its mission. For the NGOs in this study, this would imply that organizational members should reflect on the position of their sustainable internal conduct and the rationale behind its current decentralized approach. A more centralized policy could set out principles for internal conduct across the organization.