Business Responses to Competing Institutional Logics in the Climate Change Field: An Experiment

ABSTRACT We examine how competing institutional logics shape corporate responses to climate change. We theorize the climate change field as a competitive issue field where a dominant market logic of short‐term profit maximization confronts an emerging environmental logic prioritizing emissions reduction. We model shareholders as carriers of normative and coercive forces and competitors as carriers of mimetic forces, and test four hypotheses through a vignette experiment. Participants predicted the amount an oil and gas manager would invest in reducing emissions. Results show that environmental logic consistently increases expected emissions‐reduction investments relative to market logic. When shareholders' and competitors' logics conflict, participants expect managers to follow shareholders rather than competitors. Adding divestment threats as a coercive force did not produce a statistically detectable incremental effect beyond normative pressure alone. We identify shareholder‐expressed environmental logic as a potentially important lever for organizational decarbonization, creating opportunity for future research to examine its practical impact.