Pete Tashman

Why Do SMEs Go Green? An Analysis of Wine Firms in South Africa

Studies on why small and medium enterprises (SMEs) engage in pro-environmental behavior suggest that managers’ environmental responsibility plays a relatively greater role than competitiveness and legitimacy-seeking. These categories of drivers are mostly considered independent of each other. Using survey data and comparative case studies of wine firms in South Africa, this study finds that managers’ environmental responsibility is indeed the key driver in a context where state regulation hardly plays any role in regulating dispersed, rural firms. However, especially proactive firms are also characterized by expectations of competitiveness gains. The authors thus emphasize the role of institutional context and potential interaction effects between these drivers in explaining the reasons why SMEs engage in pro-environmental behavior in developing countries.

Are Members of Business for Social Responsibility More Responsible

This study examines the association between corporate social performance practices and membership in Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) between 1992 and 2006. BSR is a business association that seeks to help its members adopt enhanced corporate social performance practices. While there is an emerging literature examining voluntary initiatives as alternative policy mechanisms to regulations, most research is focused on initiatives that emphasize environmental protection. Further, studies suggest that membership in strictly voluntary initiatives tends to be associated with lower environmental performance because of “free-riding” behavior by participants. BSR differs along two dimensions when compared with other voluntary initiatives examined in the literature. First, it is a comprehensive voluntary social initiative that helps firms from diverse industries address multiple corporate social performance issues simultaneously. Second, it might limit opportunism by not offering blanket certification to its participants. Our results indicate that BSR members exhibit greater levels of positive social impacts without demonstrating significantly different levels of negative social impacts. This suggests that participation in voluntary initiatives that avoid granting blanket certifications may be associated with the adoption of new corporate social responsibility practices but not linked to the shedding of entrenched routines that produce negative externalities.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY IN THE U.S. SKI RESORT INDUSTRY

Research on corporate climate change adaptation has succeeded in classifying adaptation types, identifying organizational characteristics that motivate adaptations, and describing processes of organizational learning that underpin them. This empirical study seeks to improve our understanding of the outcomes of climate change adaptation by examining relationships between the corporate climate change vulnerability and environmental performance. Using longitudinal data from 76 firms in the U.S. Ski Resort Industry from 2001 to 2009 (n=612), I find that vulnerability is negatively related with environmental protection in firms’ biophysical environments, but positively related to environmental protection of natural resources exchanged or embedded in firms’ socioeconomic environments.