Green to Gone? Regional Institutional Logics and Firm Survival in Moral Markets

A growing body of scholarship studies the emergence of moral markets—sectors offering market-based solutions to social and environmental issues. To date, researchers have largely focused on the drivers of firm entry into these values-laden sectors. However, we know comparatively little about postentry dynamics or the determinants of firm survival in moral markets. This study examines how regional institutional logics—spatially bound, socially constructed meaning systems that legitimize specific practices and goals within a community—shape firm survival in emerging moral markets. Using a unique panel of firms entering the first eight years of the U.S. green building supply industry, we find that (1) a regional market logic amplifies the impacts of market forces by increasing the positive impact of market adoption and the negative impact of localized competition on firm survival, (2) a regional proenvironmental logic dampens the impacts of adoption and competition on firm survival, and (3) institutional complexity—the co-occurrence of both market and proenvironmental logics in a region—negates the traditional advantages of de alio (diversifying incumbent) firms, creating an opportunity for de novo (entrepreneurial entrant) firms to compete more effectively. Our study integrates research on industry emergence, institutional logics, and firm survival to address important gaps in our knowledge regarding the evolution and growth of environmental entrepreneurship in moral markets.

Strengthening Taiwan’s Green Building Certification System from Aspects of Productivity and Energy Costs to Provide a Healthier Workplace

This study estimates the relationship between poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and the increasing labor costs in green buildings in Taiwan. Specifically, poor performance of IEQ including HVAC, lighting, and indoor air quality, influences the health and well-being of occupants and leads to worse productivity, ultimately causing increased personnel cost. In Taiwan’s green building certification (GBC) system, the energy-savings category is mandatory while the IEQ category is only optional. It means that certified building cases may not reach the expected level in IEQ. Thus, this study reviews the thermal environment, indoor air quality (IAQ), and illumination performances of IEQ-certified and non-IEQ-certified buildings in 20 green buildings. Building energy and IEQ simulations were conducted to analyze the relationships between indoor comfort, energy cost, and personnel cost in green buildings. The results show that IEQ-certified green buildings averagely perform better than non-IEQ-certified ones in the aspects of IEQ and building costs. Besides, 3 of 13 non-IEQ-certified green buildings undertake extremely high additional expenditure for the poor IEQ. The results correspond to some previous findings that green-certified buildings do not necessarily guarantee good building performance. This study further inspects the pros and cons of Taiwan’s GBC system and proposes recommendations against its insufficient IEQ evaluation category. As the trade-off of energy-saving benefits with health and well-being in green buildings has always been a concern, this study aims to stimulate more quantitative research and promote a more comprehensive green building certification system in Taiwan.

Green Building Assessment In Shopping Buildings

<pre>Research on green building in terms of accounting science is still rare. This research aims to explore the benchmarks and criteria for green building in its application to multi-storey buildings and to contribute to increasing the efficiency of building operational costs.</pre><p>The method used in this research is through exploration of data from questionnaires collected using simple arithmetic techniques and graphic techniques in summarizing the observational data. The number of respondents who responded to the questionnaire that was run until this data was processed was 111 respondents.</p><p>The results of this study indicate that the application of green building benchmarks can be said to have been implemented because the average percentage of respondents who answered Yes was 58.4% or above the standardization used in this study, namely 57% (gold rank).</p><p>This research provides theoretical implications, which is able to strengthen the theory of the reliability of accounting. One of them is green accounting, which is the triple bottom line (planet, people and profit). In order that implementation of green building which has been applied only from the civil engineering condition of the building, the art of building architecture and the electrical engineering of the building, but now it has begun to be calculated regarding advantages and disadvantages similarly the benefit of the green building .</p><p>From a micro economics (organizational) point of view, this research contributes to educating property business and stakeholders that green building is not object that is expensive although is a solution for cost efficiency. People can distinguish the price of green buildings and ordinary buildings.</p>

Transferring Biophilic and Universal Design Theory to Practice With Learning From Green Buildings

The study aims to guide the assisted living facility (ALF) design, in which biophilic design, which is observed to have positive physiological, psychological, and sociological effects on humans, is observed, and the principle of universal design is accessible and designed for everyone. Since there is no place called a biophilic ALF, the study is supported by a nature-oriented design method called Green Building Rating Tools. Green building certificate systems are explored in terms of biophilic and universal design, and three of the certifications show credits linked to the theories researched. With these certificates, green building certified ALFs located in the same region are selected. With the methodology applied on the case studies of three ALFs that received these certificates, how and where biophilic and universal design patterns can be transferred from theory to practice has been examined. The study observed the extent of 14 biophilic design patterns in ALFs and tabulated how to find each pattern in these facilities according to the methods and places.

Experience of using sewage sludge in soil for green building

Wastewater sludge from municipal wastewater treatment plants in Nizhny Novgorod and soils based on them, prepared with different ratios of sludge, sawdust and peat, have been investigated. Sewage sludge-based soils contain plant nutrients and are suitable for use as fertilizing materials in green building. Under the conditions of a three-year lysimetric experiment on cereal lawn grasses, a significant efficiency of organic soils was noted in comparison with traditional soils. The lawn maintenance regime revealed differences in the mixtures of fertilizing materials in terms of the effect on the productivity of the phytocenosis. Use of sewage sludge containing large amounts of heavy metals as one of the soil components undoubtedly leads to increase in the amount of these toxic elements in the soil as a whole.