Global sustainability issues cross all sectors of society, including businesses, governments, and communities and come with substantial costs. Business organizations are increasingly expected to address sustainability issues in a responsible manner and to disclose socially responsible behaviors accurately and transparently, showing that they are effective at managing and being proactive about sustainability challenges. In light of these pressures and expectations for business organizations, the fundamental research question for this study was whether variation existed in the levels of engagement in sustainability efforts across firms globally, and, more importantly, why such variation existed. The level of strategic firm engagement in sustainability was proposed to be influenced by stakeholders and other factors that had relevance to sustainability. Three types of stakeholders with the potential power and legitimacy for influencing strategic decisions regarding firm engagement in sustainability were investigated - executive management, community and government. Multiple firm-related and country-related contextual factors were also investigated as influencers. The study was global in nature, consisting of four hundred companies in twenty-five countries. Stakeholder theory, as the foundation of the investigation, was supported by the results of the study. Executive management, community, and government as stakeholders were found to have significant influence on the level of firm engagement in sustainability. Firm size, country economy, country technological readiness, country fossil fuel dependence, and industry sector were also found to have significant influence on the level of firm engagement in sustainability and approximately 26% of the variation in firm sustainability engagement was accounted for by the combined influence of executive management, government and community as stakeholder influences and firm size and country technological readiness as contextual factors. Specific findings showed that there were higher levels of firm engagement in sustainability when executive management provided explicit support for sustainability as a strategic issue, in communities with positive supportive norms for sustainability and a higher propensity for citizen-based political action and when there was an optimal level of government regulation and formalized institutional power. Other factors that led to higher levels of firm engagement in sustainability were for firms in energy-related and automotive industry sectors, for larger firms based on revenue size, and for firms with headquarters located in countries with developed economies and higher technological readiness.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

Property rights are the backbone of Western Civilization. Capitalism can only be successful if individuals feel secure about the ownership of their assets. Patents are the property rights granted to the inventor by the government. Without these rights, inventors will find it extremely difficult monetizing their contributions to society. Thus, in an effort to incentivize innovation and commit society to human progress, our Founding Fathers built our country on a strong set of intellectual property rights. At the same time, nothing impedes innovation like a monopoly and, in essence, all a patent amounts to is a monopoly, the right to exclude others from monetizing a specific innovation over an extended period of time. Hence, at the margin, patents increase the incentive to create new patentable knowledge, while simultaneously also stifling the dissemination of that knowledge. A good patent system strikes the right balance between innovation and a government-granted, anti-competitive monopoly. After a 20-year period of an unprecedentedly pro-patent environment in the United States, the value of patents has never been higher. Patents, as opposed to their intended use of incentivizing innovation, are now seen as a form of protection against litigation, and also a weapon to litigate patent infringements to extract license fees and royalty payments from companies who are supposedly in violation of these patents. The pendulum has swung, and patents are now stifling innovation to an extent not conceived of by our Founding Fathers. This thesis will explore the reasons for the extreme increase in the value of patents over the years and will attempt to propose a plan of action to swing the pendulum back where our Founding Fathers originally intended it to be.

abstract / Law / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy