Title of Dissertation: national renewable energy policy

 
Table 9. 
Categories of risks. 
Source 
Description 
Internal environment 
Risks caused by internal factors such as internal 
resource and capability 
External 
environment 
Competition 
Risks caused by competition 
Demand 
Risks caused by demand or consumers 
Policy 
Risks caused by policy or political factors 
Resource 
Risks caused by availability of raw materials and 
other resources 
Supplier 
Risks caused by suppliers 
Technology 
Risks caused by new technology, the relations 
between the technology and the infrastructure, 
and the possibility of choosing alternative 
technological options 
Other 
Risks caused by other factors 
The codes of policy risks were separated and were coded again based on the pre-
determined categories: 
uncertainty
and 
contradiction 
(Table 10). A policy risk 
component was coded as uncertainty if a firm could not predict the direction or the effect 
of policy on the firm. If a firm predicts the effect of a policy risk component on the firm, 
the policy risk was coded as contradiction. The four categories of contradiction were 
developed based on the study of Seo and Creed.
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Seo, Myeong-Gu, and WE Douglas Creed. "Institutional contradictions, praxis, and 
institutional change: A dialectical perspective." 
Academy of Management Review
27, no. 
2 (2002): 222-247. 

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Table 10. 
Categories of policy risk. 
Source 
Description 
Uncertainty 
The direction of a policy or its effect on the 
firm is not known 
Contradiction 
Inefficiency 
A policy causes inefficiency of business 
Unresponsiveness 
A policy is unresponsive to the external 
environment 
Incompatibility 
Policies are inconsistent between them
Conflicts of interest 
A policy cannot serve diverse interests
For the qualitative content analysis of the firms’ reactions to the environment, the 
author read each annual report and extracted themes. Since only a few annual reports 
provide a standardized strategy section, the author looked for the descriptions of actions 
or planned actions of the firms in the whole annual report. The extracted themes were 
analyzed, and an explanation for firms’ reactions to the external environment was 
developed. 
Findings 
Changes of the external environment of multinational solar corporations 
The results of the structured content analysis show two trends. First, the reporting on risk 
factors that solar multinationals face have continuously increased. Second, the 
corporations have identified more risk factors from policies over time.
 
Increasing risks 
The analysis of the annual reports indicates that the risks of the global solar 
manufacturers had grown over time. The number of risk factors reported from the internal 
environment has almost doubled, and that of risk factors from the external environment 

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have more than doubled in recent ten years (Figure 11). The risk factors from the external 
environment have grown more sharply compared to the risk components from internal 
environment. As a result, in 2015, the number of the risk factors from external 
environment accounts for almost half of the total number of the risk factors.