This study aims to investigate how carbon risk (CR), as an institutional pressure, shapes the resilience of manufacturing firms in China within the broader context of the nation’s “dual carbon” goals. It conceptualizes environmental regulations as institutional mechanisms that moderate the relationship between CR and organizational resilience.
Drawing on organizational theory, the study interprets command-and-control regulation as a coercive mechanism and market-based regulations (MBRs) as a normative mechanism. Empirical analysis is conducted to examine how these mechanisms influence firms’ resistance and recovery dimensions of resilience under CR.
The results reveal that CR significantly weakens organizational resilience by constraining firms’ capacities for resistance and recovery. However, environmental regulations mitigate these adverse effects through distinct mechanisms. CAC regulation, as a coercive institutional force, compels firms to restructure processes and adopt low-carbon technologies, while MBR, as a normative and resource-allocation mechanism, alleviates financial strain and stimulates adaptive innovation. Furthermore, the impact of CR on corporate organizational resilience is not homogeneous but exhibits high context-dependence. Its mechanism and intensity demonstrate systematic heterogeneity across four key dimensions: industry pollution intensity, organizational life cycle stage, firm ownership type and geographic region. These variations collectively demonstrate that the shaping of micro-level firm behavior and performance by external institutional pressure is deeply embedded within the complex context formed by the meso-level industry structure, micro-level organizational characteristics and macro-level institutional environment.
This study advances organizational theory by reconceptualizing CR as an institutional pressure and firm resilience as an adaptive capability, showing how external institutional environments shape firms’ resistance and recovery capacities. The study develops a multidimensional framework of environmental regulation, distinguishing coercive (CAC) and normative (MB) mechanisms, and demonstrates how these forces reshape organizational responses to CR. The findings also reveal significant contextual heterogeneity in resilience, indicating that the effects of CR vary across firms with different pollution intensities, life-cycle stages, ownership types and geographic regions. These insights enrich theoretical understanding by integrating institutional pressure, adaptation and contingency perspectives, thereby extending resilience research into the domain of environmental uncertainty.
