Authors:

Suntae Kim – Johns Hopkins, Carey Business School

Todd Schifeling – Temple University, Fox School of Business

Interviewers:

D. Scott Taylor – University of Washington, Foster School of Business

Mary Struzska-Tyamayev – Boston College, Carroll School of Management

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392221091734

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You can read an except of this interview below.
You can also listen to the full conversation by playing this audio file:

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Mary: Thank you for agreeing to meet with us and do this. We’re so excited to have a chance to have a conversation with you.

Scott: Tell us about you and your research, and then we’ll get into the paper.

Suntae: I’m an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School just moved from Boston College last year. And I do this paper is really a different kind of reflection of my evolution as a scholar. So the paper started as my second-year paper. At the time, it was purely quantitative. And through my dissertation project, I converted into a qualitative researcher. And I did a qualitative dissertation on entrepreneurship in Detroit. And recently I kind of expanded; I did a little bit of a pivot into the research on crisis. So that’s how I am evolving and I’m excited and honored to be here.

Todd: And I’m Todd Schifeling, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, and we were overlapping Ph.D. students at the University of Michigan. I was in the sociology program and Suntae was at the business school. So that was a huge opportunity for me. So many collaborations come out of relationships between PhD students in the same cohort. So a little bit of advice for PhD students—don’t just focus on working with faculty. There’s a lot more mileage to be gained out of working with your peers I think. And yeah, I was so happy that Suntae invited me to help him develop the paper it fits into my broader research about sustainability. And most of my papers are in that area. And I’m interested in social movement influences as well.

Scott: Well, could you map out that journey for us? That’s something we’re both very, very interested in.

Suntae: It was a roller coaster ride; the paper has changed a lot. It has three parts. The first two are talking about how B Corp certification is driven by two opposing behaviors by large corporations who are trying to maximize profit and maximize shareholder value and also corporations who are trying to call out sustainability. Our quantitative analysis finds that B Corp certification is driven by both of them. And then we get a little bit deeper into the qualitative analysis of the motives—why B Corps are becoming B Corps. And from there, we found that there are actually mixed motives. There are two major motives: one involves trying to revolutionize capitalism, and the other involves distancing themselves from the “green washers” or the pretenders or corporations that were just doing CSR on the surface.

That was the beginning of the paper. And through the review process, the reviewers wanted to know, a lot. They wanted to know the implication of having both motives. And from there. We did a little bit of a qualitative investigation into how the B Corp movement evolved over the past 10 years. And we found that having these mixed motives helped them navigate the challenges of a growing social movement. And we called this “paradoxical mobilization.”

Todd: Also, we had an inspiring editor. I felt I almost felt like I was back in a Ph.D. seminar because he was like, “what is the big idea that is going to come out of this?” That was his encouragement. It allowed us to have these big thoughts, which is quite different from most review processes that I’ve been in. And so we were making major removals, major additions, and trying new theoretical frameworks because we had this really encouraging guidance to figure out what the big conclusions were.

Mary: In a similar vein, can you talk a little bit more about the research question itself? So how it merged and changed over time?

Suntae: There were some big changes. In the first round, the reviewers didn’t like it. Reviewers liked the empirics the data and the findings but they didn’t like the framing.

Todd: And we’re very grateful to the reviewers—that they said there’s something here. Even though there are all these problems, there’s something here. They gave us an opportunity and the encouragement to build towards that.

Suntae: Right. Then, we had to revise the research question once again with the addition of a qualitative component into the paper, because the whole paper changed quite significantly with that addition.

Todd: I think there is a tension between an inductive versus deductive approach. For instance, for a long time, we were opening the paper with two contrasting quotes from B Corps that had these different motives. And through the review process, we ended up removing those and making the introduction a bit more theoretical.

Suntae: Yeah. That’s what was unusual about this paper—the structure of it. It has a quant, qual, qual, sequence, and that’s pretty unusual. And we had a reviewer who wanted to make it more conventional, and for us to develop hypotheses and test the hypotheses. And I remember we resisted that, because we wanted to keep it aligned with the way the paper was developed. And other reviewers and the editor supported this idea.

Scott: Why did you want to keep the structure as is?

Suntae: It just didn’t feel right. It just was not the way we developed the paper. It’s not the way our theoretical insights are derived. So we wanted it to be as authentic as possible. Ultimately, that quant-qual sequence worked well for the third investigation in the paper, which revealed new theoretical insight. So preserving the original structure made it more coherent as a whole.

Scott: Wasn’t it in 2018 that B Lab specifically started to incorporate large corporations as “Movement Makers,” so you had this inflowing of more data as the movement was happening in real-time?

Todd: That is a really good point! If the review process hadn’t taken so long, we wouldn’t have had so much to write about. It still seemed like an early phase; we couldn’t conclude what was the ultimate effect of the B Lab effort. That’s a really interesting point though; things were unfolding as we were revising the paper.

Scott: When you saw this unfold, were you excited or nervous about the outcomes?

Todd: It was a very beneficial discovery. We had our heads down in the literature and the methods most of the time. And it was only when our reviewers pushed us to think about the bigger trajectory that we looked up and realized, oh my gosh, all these things have happened in just in the last couple of years, and all of these things had happened that were relevant.

Suntae: Yeah, a recent development by the B Corp movement in the B Lab helped us see the pattern more clearly. In our last round of revisions, we realized that their very cautious effort to expand the movement scale in 2012, when they first started certifying subsidiaries of non-B Corp corporations. That was, I think, one of the important turning points for them. And all the things that happened later, Scott, as you mentioned, culminated in 2018. And they’re still overhauling their certification scheme now.

Scott: What would you say to them incorporating these different changes into their ethos?

Suntae: Todd and I are in the process of exploring that. As a sequel to our paper, we wanted to study the ongoing evolution of the movement, but we have a strong desire and very little time to do that.

Todd: The time is not ripe yet, but it’s all unfolding in real-time. We’ve been involved. Publishing these papers can open up a lot of really neat opportunities to engage with the public and with the people you’re studying and stuff. And so Suntae and I have both done media appearances and things because there’s a lot of interest in B Lab. People have asked the kind of question that you’ve asked. And what I would say anyway, is that greenwashing is a productive phenomenon because nobody is ever perfect. There’s no moment where all efforts stop and you’ve arrived at sustainability and things like that.

It’s a continual growth process, and greenwashing is a form of critique to call out organizations that aren’t meeting the expectations of their stakeholders and say, you need to do better. So I think it’s a really powerful motivator for improvement. And that’s kind of what our paper speaks to—B Lab and the movement have benefited from the fact that they’ve had a diversity of ideas within the movement. And some people are focusing on growing the movement, while other people are focusing on holding the movement true to its roots.

Another point you brought up that I just wanted to mention is that we were able to meet with B Labs research team. I was just totally blown away by that. They are collecting every paper written about B Corps and reading them. We think we write these papers, and the best we can hope for is that another academic reads them. But I was completely blown away by the fact that they were generous with their time and their support and said that they found our paper insightful and they shared it with other leaders at the organization. So that was probably the best thing I’d heard. It was a really meaningful moment for me.

Scott: What did they get out of your paper?

Suntae: This is super interesting. I think the big thing is it provided them with a new perspective through which they could understand their movement. For us, we’ve been thinking about this. We have developed this framework and perspective. So it’s obvious to me and maybe obvious to the leaders academically. But, for the members of the movement or the people who are doing the movement, for them to be able to see what they do through this paradoxical mobilization lens, it can be refreshing.

Scott: Does this have implications for other types of certifications? What type of implications does your research have for other types of new certification firms?

Todd: Ultimately how we framed the paper, we connected to this literature on all these different certifications market alternatives and tried to situate this phenomenon against these other ones and maybe kind of typecasted how certain alternative movements work.

Scott: This has been so interesting. Thank you both for taking the time to discuss your paper!

Interviewer Bios:

D Scott Taylor – University of Washington, Foster School of Business

Scott Taylor is a PhD student in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Washington. His research is concerned with the effects of legitimacy on young firms and innovation specifically concerning choices to obtain environmental, social, and governance certifications.

Mary Struzska-Tyamayev – Boston College, Carroll School of Management

Mary is a Ph.D. student in Organization Studies at Boston College. Her research seeks to better understand how people of multiple and complex identities make space for themselves in organizations.