Why do so many responsible business initiatives fail? While earlier studies have stressed the lack of commitment, we know little about the ways in which prosocial firms seek to secure the requisite resources to accomplish such practices. This study investigates how the management of multiple resource dependencies impacts the (non)accomplishment of a firm’s aspired responsible practices. A granular, comparative study of six prosocial firms embarking on voluntary environmental practices over a decade shows that mainstreamed development resulted from securing the full-fledged and sustained support of all complementary resource providers over a longer period, whereas practices facing constrained or missing resources turned into partial or outright failures. Securing multiple resources involves several problems (resource inaccessibility, resource dispersion, and resource instability), which firms address through different mechanisms. They empathically mobilize resources to overcome resistance from reluctant actors, enact integrative structures to secure resources from dispersed actors, and reshuffle resources to respond to fluctuations in availability and need. The combined use of these mechanisms does not guarantee success but is imperative to overcome the barriers that threaten the mainstreaming of responsible practices. These insights have implications for the corporate responsibility, resource dependence, and ecosystem literatures.

中文翻译：

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同步发展或完全失败：管理负责任实践发展的资源配置


为什么这么多负责任的商业计划都失败了？虽然早期的研究强调了缺乏承诺，但我们对亲社会公司寻求获得完成此类做法所需的资源的方式知之甚少。本研究调查了多种资源依赖性的管理如何影响公司雄心勃勃的负责任实践的（非）完成。对十多年来开展自愿环境实践的六家亲社会公司进行的详细比较研究表明，主流化发展源于在较长时间内获得所有互补资源提供者的全面和持续支持，而面临资源受限或缺失的实践则变成了部分或彻底的失败。保护多个资源涉及几个问题（资源无法访问、资源分散和资源不稳定），公司通过不同的机制解决这些问题。他们善解人意地调动资源以克服来自不情愿的行为体的阻力，制定综合结构以保护分散行为体的资源，并重新调整资源以应对可用性和需求的波动。这些机制的联合使用并不能保证成功，但对于克服威胁负责任做法主流化的障碍是必不可少的。这些见解对企业责任、资源依赖和生态系统文献具有影响。