The sustainability challenges society faces call for firms to manage their use of natural resources wisely. Prior work on firm responses to sustainability challenges has largely focused on explaining and enhancing economic rather than environmental performance. We build on recent developments to extend resource dependence theory to include natural resources and seek to explain how business- and environment-related firm activities influence the use of natural resources. Using a configurational approach, we develop a conceptual model that explains the return on natural resources of firms based on four distinct sets of business- and environment-related comparative advantages. An illustrative application to the car-manufacturing sector demonstrates the practical applicability of our model and provides first insights into configurations we are likely to observe in practice. Our model and its application show that economic success is neither necessary nor sufficient to enhance a firm's return on natural resources.

社会面临的可持续性挑战要求企业明智地管理自然资源的使用。先前关于企业应对可持续性挑战的工作主要集中在解释和提高经济而非环境绩效上。我们以最近的发展为基础，将资源依赖理论扩展到包括自然资源，并试图解释与商业和环境相关的公司活动如何影响自然资源的使用。使用配置方法，我们开发了一个概念模型，该模型基于四组与业务和环境相关的不同比较优势来解释公司的自然资源回报。对汽车制造行业的说明性应用证明了我们模型的实际适用性，并提供了我们可能在实践中观察到的配置的初步见解。我们的模型及其应用表明，经济上的成功对于提高公司对自然资源的回报既不必要也不充分。