Shaping environmental responsiveness: The influence of national institutions on SMEs of varying sizes
Shaping environmental responsiveness: The influence of national institutions on SMEs of varying sizes
Keywords
Authors
Date
2020-07-14
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
A growing recognition of the significant aggregate impact that SMEs have on the
environment has fuelled research into the factors influencing their environmental
responsiveness. Although previous studies have identified several important predictors at the
level of the individual and the firm, much less is known about the influence of the
institutional context. In this thesis, I address this shortcoming by exploring the relationship
between several elements of the national institutional context and SMEs’ adoption of
environmental practices. Additionally, I extend previous research into the effects of firm size
by arguing that the influence of the institutional context may not be the same for SMEs of
different sizes. I research the influence of the institutional context on SMEs of varying sizes
by using unique data for over 5000 SMEs originating from 14 European countries. The
results of multiple ordinal logistic regression analyses show that SMEs operating in distinct
institutional contexts vary significantly in their adoption of environmental practices.
Moreover, the influence of certain national institutions differs for micro, small, and mediumsized firms. My findings point to the existence of a ‘business case’ for environmental
responsiveness among SMEs, where this was previously only assumed to exist among large
firms
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen