Firms increasingly need to attend to diverse stakeholder groups with different demands and integrate a variety of sometimes-competing societal priorities within their business activities. Yet corporate sustainability research provides limited insight into how different sustainability dimensions may potentially interact, often implicitly assuming independence across diverse sustainability dimensions. We illustrate this issue by documenting how efforts to accelerate growth of green jobs to mitigate climate change appears to be associated with a negative impact in terms of slowing down progress towards meeting workforce diversity goals. Our empirical analysis relies on detailed online job profile data on over 16 million individual job positions in 713 Fortune 1000 firms in the US between 2011 and 2022. We further explore micro-level mechanisms behind this trade-off, specifically those related to the locational features typical of green jobs, as potentially driving this effect. We argue that making progress on one dimension of sustainability sometimes have undesirable effects on another dimension, thus highlighting potential trade-offs among different dimensions within sustainability, challenging that these can be pursued independently. In doing so, we contribute to the emerging literature on the multiplicity of dimensions within sustainability and the potential trade-offs encountered in managing across multiple dimensions.

Green patents are especially suitable for firms to gain distinctive market positions because of their high novelty. However, the high uncertainty and pressure by regulation and society incentivize firms to gain legitimacy by following competitors. Applying a strategic balance lens, we explain how green patenting distinctiveness contributes to firm value. Firms also struggle to maintain green patenting persistence and supplement green patents with green CVC investments. As ideal distinctiveness needs to be balanced across several strategic dimensions in the green context, green patenting persistence and green CVC portfolio distinctiveness are important moderators to consider. We find that green patenting persistence does not significantly affect the association between green patenting distinctiveness and firm value. However, green CVC portfolio distinctiveness negatively moderates this association because its saliency undermines legitimacy. We build our empirical tests on a multi-source dataset of S&P 500 firms from 2008 to 2023.

We examine the comparative role of public versus private actors in addressing grand challenges through adoption of desalination technologies that vary in sustainability dimensions. While prior research has explored how governments promote new technologies via supply-side (e.g., via subsidies), we explore public (versus private) actors’ role on demand-side (as clients). Using data on historical droughts and all desalination investments worldwide (1950s-2015), we find that, while private clients respond with more plants launched, public clients are associated with more energy-efficient technology choices. Crucially, this effect is contingent upon the institutional development of the countries. We further demonstrate how both sector investments are associated with negative externalities through environmental pollution. By highlighting sustainability trade-offs, we foster a better understanding of economic organizing for pressing societal issues.