External drivers for embedding sustainability practices within the Qatar oil and gas industry: An institutional theory perspective

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by British Academy of Management in BAM Conference in the Cloud Proceedings. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.With the increasing importance given to sustainability, organisations now-a-days are implementing sustainability practice within their strategies to ensure a positive impact on their stakeholders, society and environment. Qatar seems to be following the rest of the world and has decided to introduce a sustainability plan to ensure prosperity through its national vision and strategy plans that targets all of its sectors and especially the oil and gas. Furthermore, there is a very limited research on external drivers for implementing sustainability practices within organisations in the Qatar oil and gas, which is the core purpose of this paper. Using institutional theory, the paper had shed the light on external pressures exerted by different institutions on organisations in order to implement sustainability practices. Through a systematic approach, qualitative data collection and analysis was carried using semi-structured interviews and content analysis of professional from the Qatar oil and gas industry to enquire about the external drivers that pushed their organisations to implement sustainability initiatives. The findings show that organisations are driven to implement sustainability by seven drivers, that could be grouped into three main categories, coercive, normative and mimetic pressures. It is argued that organisations��� attempt to conform and reduce the uncertainty regarding sustainability would depend heavily on the type of force exerted on them. Therefore, decision makers and executives must have a better understanding of sustainability pressures exerted on their organisation in order to ensure an improved sustainability performance