These slides accompanied a talk I gave at the 2017 Global B Corp Academic Community Roundtable on October 4, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management. The research underlying the talk is accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Venturing.

1. The WellWiki Project
Joel Gehman
Assistant Professor
Strategic Management & Organization
Positively Deviant:
Identity Work Through
Certification
Matthew Grimes, Joel Gehman, Ke Cao
B Corp Academic Community Roundtable
Rotman School of Management
October 4, 2017

3. Motivation
Early research on social entrepreneurship often treated social
entrepreneurs as a homogenous group.
More recent studies, however, highlight the potential for
important identity (Battilana, Dimitriadis, Lee, & Ramarajan,
2017) and contextual differences (Gehman & Grimes, 2016),
which might lead to differences in organizational action.
We investigate such differences in the context of the B Corp
certification by asking: Why and under what conditions do
businesses choose to obtain sustainability certification?

4. Identity differences
Societal gender expectations can affect one’s orientation
toward pro-social and pro-environmental causes (Dietz et al.,
2002; Eagly, 2009; Hyde, 2014; Zelezny et al., 2000).
Contemporary values-based differences between genders
lead to greater representation of women among social
entrepreneurs (Hechavarria et al., 2012); women social
entrepreneurs more likely to forego commercial activities to
support their growth (Battilana et al., forthcoming).

5. Contextual differences
Social entrepreneurship spans different industrial and
regional contexts, which also vary in their support (or lack
thereof) for social and environmental values (Dacin et al.,
2011; Gehman and Grimes, 2017; Moroz and Hindle, 2012).
Such differences regarding sustainability values are likely to
render the adoption of the B Corp certification as more or less
deviant (i.e., non-conforming) relative to a social enterprise’s
regional and industrial context.

6. Core proposition
Identity work refers to “people being engaged in forming,
repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the
constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and
distinctiveness” (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003, p. 1165).
Actors pursue sustainability certifications not as a means for
overcoming deficits in legitimacy but rather as a form of
identity work that affirms those actors’ values which are
perceived as contextually distinctive.
We call this positive deviance: “intentional behaviors that
significantly depart from the norms of a referent group in
honorable ways” (Spreitzer and Sonenshein, 2004: 841).

7. Hypothesis 1
Hypothesis 1: Woman-owned businesses are more likely to
obtain environmental, social, and governance (ESG)
certification than non-woman-owned businesses, all else
being equal (i.e., “the identity effect”).

8. Moderating Hypotheses 2-4
Woman-owned businesses are more (less) likely to obtain ESG
certification in contexts where: Hypothesis 2, sustainability
norms are weaker (stronger); Hypothesis 3, the prevalence of
Certified B Corporations is lower (higher); Hypothesis 4, fewer
(more) woman-owned businesses operate.

9. Moderating Hypotheses 2-4
Woman-owned businesses are more (less) likely to obtain ESG
certification in contexts where: Hypothesis 2, sustainability
norms are weaker (stronger); Hypothesis 3, the prevalence of
Certified B Corporations is lower (higher); Hypothesis 4,
fewer (more) woman-owned businesses operate.

10. Moderating Hypotheses 2-4
Woman-owned businesses are more (less) likely to obtain ESG
certification in contexts where: Hypothesis 2, sustainability
norms are weaker (stronger); Hypothesis 3, the prevalence of
Certified B Corporations is lower (higher); Hypothesis 4, fewer
(more) woman-owned businesses operate.

11. Data and method

12. Key variables
DV: Certified B Corporation = 1 if the business
became certified following assessment
H1: Woman Owned = 1 if the business reported
being “woman-owned” on the BIA
H2: Weak Sustainability Norms = mean number of
ESG concerns for public companies in a given context
H3: B Corp Mimesis = count of Certified B Corps in a
given context
H4: Prevalence of Woman-Owned Businesses =
count of woman-owned businesses in a given
context

13. A note about “context”
CASE B Lab data are de-identified, but inspired by
Porac et al’s (1995) Scottish knitwear study, we
coded each business into 5 regions and 18 industry
groups, resulting in 90 possible region-industry dyads
Following Gehman & Grimes (2016), for H2 we
collected data from MSCI ESG STATS, providing
sustainability norms for each region-industry
For H3, we tabulate the number of Certified B Corps
for each dyad using the CASE B Lab data
For H4, we collected data from the U.S. Census
Bureau Survey of Business Owners

14. Control variables
Revenue (log) = self reported annual revenue
Employees = self reported number of employees
Seeking funding = 1 if seeking outside financing
Benefit corporation = 1 if incorporated as a benefit
corporation or benefit LLC
Survey completion = averages 98%, range 70-100
Public companies = count of publicly-traded
companies in a given context
Region dummies
Industry dummies

15. Model estimation
Our sample includes 1,251 U.S. businesses “at risk” for
becoming Certified B Corps, but only businesses scoring ≥80
points on the BIA are eligible to become certified.
Accordingly, we model this choice using Heckman’s (1979)
two-stage procedure using Stata’s Heckprobit command
• In Stage 1, a probit regression predicts the likelihood that a
business will qualify for certification (≥80 points on the BIA)
• In Stage 2, we model the likelihood a business will become
certified, conditional on qualifying to do so

16. Results: Heckprobit
DV: B Corp
Certification
H1: Woman-Owned Business (Identity Effect)
✔
H2: Woman-Owned Business
x Weak Sustainability Norms ✔
H3: Woman-Owned Business
x Low Mimetic Pressure ✔
H4: Woman-Owned Business
x Low Prevalence of Woman Owned Businesses ✔

17. H2: Identity Effect x
Weak Sustainability Norms

18. H3: Identity Effect x
Low Mimetic Pressure

19. H4: Identity Effect x
Few WO Businesses

20. Contribution 1
How Women “Jumpstart” the Field of Social
Entrepreneurship

21. Contribution 2
The Importance of Contextual Distinctiveness and
Organizational Standards for Understanding Owners’
Identity Work

22. Contribution 3
Extending Scholarly Understanding of Early-Stage
Certification Adoption

23. Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by grants from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council;
Office of the Vice President of Research at the
University of Alberta; Canadian Centre for Corporate
Social Responsibility; Alberta School of Business; and
University of Alberta Killam Research Fund.

24. Extras

25. 3 robustness checks
1. Instead of Heckman models, we simply dropped 232
observations which scored <80 on the BIA and tested
probit models. All 4 hypotheses were supported
2. We ”saturated” and “simplified” our Stage 1 selection
specification, adding all interaction terms and using
only our controls, respectively. All 4 hypotheses were
supported in both cases
3. We dropped 415 observations with no reported
revenues. These were assumed to be true $0 in the
prior analysis; here we assume they are missing. All 4
hypotheses were supported.