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Title: | Greening in the spotlight: How public inquisitiveness shapes European SMEs' actions in response to climate concerns | Authors: | Brinkerink, Jasper BAMMENS, Yannick |
Issue Date: | 2024 | Publisher: | WILEY | Source: | Business Strategy and the Environment, | Status: | Early view | Abstract: | We examine greening activities among European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the product and process domains, and argue that greater public climate concern in an SME's home country environment primarily associates with greening in the inherently more visible product domain. Moreover, we introduce the concept of public inquisitiveness and propose that greater inquisitiveness prompts SMEs to also pay attention to less visible process greening activities as a response to public climate pressures. We test our ideas using multilevel regression models on a large representative sample of SMEs from 18 European Union (EU) countries. The study's main ideas are supported by the findings, which point to possible trade-offs between product and process greening among resource-constrained SMEs, and suggest the general public's inquisitiveness indeed plays a key role in preventing under engagement in less outwardly visible greening strategies. We discuss our study's implications for discourse on how and under which conditions normative institutional forces shape firm-level sustainable behavior, as well as for SMEs' pro-environmental stakeholders. | Notes: | Brinkerink, J (corresponding author), Univ Edinburgh, Business Sch, 29 Buccleuch Pl, Edinburgh EH8 9JS, Scotland. jasper.brinkerink@ed.ac.uk |
Keywords: | greening visibility;institutional theory;process greening;product greening;public climate concern;public inquisitiveness | Document URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/1942/43098 | ISSN: | 0964-4733 | e-ISSN: | 1099-0836 | DOI: | 10.1002/bse.3792 | ISI #: | 001225011100001 | Rights: | 2024 The Author(s). Business Strategy and The Environment published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. | Category: | A1 | Type: | Journal Contribution |
Appears in Collections: | Research publications |
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Bus Strat Env.pdf | Published version | 1.63 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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