A confirmatory study of the institutional entrepreneur's resources in the design of legitimised voluntary sustainability initiatives for supply chains

Abstract

Having developed a comprehensive research model in Chapter 6, the next step of the thesis involves the testing and confirmation of the derived hypotheses in a large-scale quantitative study. In order to gather quantitative data, the study followed the lead of recent resourcebased investigations of interconnected firms (e.g., Gulati et al., 2005; Kale & Singh, 2007; Mesquita & Brush, 2008; Mesquita & Lazzarini, 2008; Mesquita et al., 2008) as well as of Marcus & Anderson's (2008) work in the field of institutional entrepreneurship and data collection with a survey instrument. Following the call of Boyd et al. (2005), the study used multi-item scales. After the data gathering, the data was analysed via the Structural Equation Method (SEM).