Voluntary Sustainability Certifications as Institutional Devices: Signaling, Diffusion, and Rhetorical Construction Across Levels of Analysis

Voluntary sustainability certifications have become central instruments through which organizations claim, negotiate, and institutionalize legitimacy. Yet existing research often treats certifications as static labels, offering limited insight into how they operate across levels of analysis and over time. This dissertation reconceptualizes voluntary sustainability certifications as dynamic institutional devices, using B Corp certification as a focal case. Across four studies, it develops a multi-level framework explaining how certifications are theorized in scholarship, function as signals in entrepreneurial finance, diffuse under configurations of normative pressures, and recalibrate organizational rhetoric around critical certification milestones. Empirically, the dissertation combines a systematic review, venture-level analyses of financing outcomes, a 92-country panel (2007–2023) on diffusion dynamics, and large-scale longitudinal website text analysis using semantic embeddings and interaction-weighted event-study designs. The findings show that B Corp certification operates as a credible but conditional signal in entrepreneurial finance, that diffusion is shaped by regulatory, informational, and environmental pressures whose effects vary under environmental turbulence, and that certification events trigger systematic rhetorical dynamics of anticipatory buildup, maintenance, and dissociation. Collectively, the dissertation enriches signaling theory, institutional theory, and event-oriented perspectives by theorizing certifications as dynamic devices and by integrating computational text analysis into the study of institutional and rhetorical change.