Research on mining high performance path rules for new energy enterprises from the perspective of social responsibility—Empirical data from China

Abstract

The high-quality development of new energy enterprises is of great significance to promote carbon peak and carbon neutrality and cope with the global warming crisis. However, with the increasing intensity of market competition and the appropriate weakening of the expected future subsidies, how to improve their performance through the fulfillment of the social responsibility of stakeholders has become a key scientific problem to be solved. Given the features of the new energy industry, including substantial initial investment, formidable technical barriers, and a pronounced reliance on policy support, this paper takes 182 new energy concept enterprises listed in China's A-shares in 2011–2020 as the research object. Employing qualitative comparative analysis, we extract four key rules for achieving high performance in new energy enterprises from the perspective of value co-creation of core stakeholders, including capital stakeholders (shareholders and creditors), technical stakeholders (employees), policy stakeholders (government and society), and upstream and downstream stakeholders (suppliers and customers). Then, we explore the performance improvement rules of typical cases. Our findings reveal that within the realm of new energy enterprises, capital-intensive enterprises with cost leadership and tax incentives, energy-manufacturing enterprises with suppliers dependence and saving environmental input, technology-innovation enterprises with cost leadership and talents dependence, and comprehensive-mature enterprises with suppliers dependence and tax incentives are more likely to achieve high performance. The findings can better guide management practice and promote the high-quality development of new energy enterprises.