When culture shapes corporate sustainability: Reflections from a sustainability workshop

I will admit that presenting your own research in front of a room full of fellow PhD students and faculty is a uniquely nerve-wracking experience. You know your material inside out, and yet, it is precisely in those moments of open discussion and probing questions that a piece of research truly comes alive. That was my experience at the Essex Business School PhD Workshop on Sustainability in May 2026, where I shared work from my MRes dissertation.

Sustainability research is inherently interdisciplinary, and the workshop reminded me that some of the best insights come from unexpected directions. Seeing researchers from very different backgrounds, finance, management, and environmental studies, approach the broad question of corporate sustainability from completely different angles reinforced for me why this field matters and why it resists simple answers.

The question that started it all

My research started with a deceptively simple observation: firms in different parts of the United States behave very differently when it comes to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, and much of that difference does not seem explained by regulation or firm size alone. What if the cultural character of the region where a company is headquartered plays an equally important role?

This led me to examine two deep cultural forces that vary enormously across US states: religious intensity and political ideology. These are not variables that typically appear in ESG research, which tends to focus on firm-level characteristics like executive behaviour or board composition. But firms do not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in communities with strong normative expectations about what counts as responsible business behaviour.

What the data showed and why it surprised me

Using a ten-year panel dataset of US-listed firms (2012–2022), I matched ESG scores from Refinitiv against state-level measures of religious intensity and political leaning. Two findings stood out.

First, both higher religiosity and greater political conservatism in a state were independently associated with lower ESG scores among firms headquartered there, even after controlling for firm size, profitability, and all stable firm characteristics. This does not mean religion is “bad” for ethics. Rather, it suggests that certain cultural expectations embedded in more religious or more conservative environments may place less emphasis on the kind of stakeholder-oriented sustainability commitments that ESG scores capture.

Second, and more surprisingly, the effect of religiosity was far stronger in politically liberal states than in conservative ones. When the external environment, regulation, investor pressure, and public opinion are strongly pro-ESG, but internal cultural values pull in a different direction, the tension produces the most pronounced negative effect. In conservative states, where scepticism toward expansive ESG commitments is already more normalised, the additional drag from religiosity is comparatively smaller.

The core message: context transforms meaning. The same cultural variable can have very different implications depending on its institutional surroundings.

What the workshop changed

The feedback I received at the workshop pushed my thinking in two important directions I had not fully anticipated.

The first concerned causality. Several participants asked whether the relationship I found might run in the opposite direction: could it be that firms with lower ESG commitments are simply more likely to locate in conservative or religious states, rather than being shaped by those environments? It is a fair challenge, and one I had partially addressed with lagged variables and fixed effects, but it has pushed me to think more carefully about quasi-experimental designs in future work.

The second concerned how I think about cultural context itself. A comment from the floor questioned whether state-level religiosity and political leaning are really capturing institutional pressure on firms, or whether they are proxies for something else entirely; local labour market norms, industry composition, or historical path dependencies. It has encouraged me to move away from treating culture as a single explanatory layer, and instead to think more carefully about the specific mechanisms through which regional norms actually reach firm-level decision-making. That is a harder question, and probably a more interesting one.

Why this matters beyond the numbers

Presenting this research at the workshop reminded me that sustainability debates are never purely technical or financial; they are also deeply social and cultural. That is what makes this area of research both challenging and fascinating.

For policymakers, it suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to ESG mandates may struggle in regions where the cultural environment creates conflicting institutional pressures. For investors and rating agencies, a firm’s ESG score may look quite different once its regional cultural context is taken into account. And for corporate managers, understanding the cultural landscape of their operating environment is not a soft consideration; it is a strategic one.

Above all, the research reinforces a point that is easy to overlook: ESG performance is not just a product of managerial intention or regulatory compliance. It is shaped by the broader cultural and ideological institutions in which firms are embedded. Context matters, and abandoning the assumption that any single cultural variable is simply “good” or “bad” for corporate sustainability is a necessary step toward more honest and useful ESG research.