Plus ça Change? A Varieties of Capitalism Approach to Social Concern for the Environment

Abstract

To what extent can society and business be sources of informal environmental governance? Because environmental damage occurs in the production process, and the act of consuming the outputs of it, this question is addressed by applying key insights of the Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) approach to social attitudes revealed through responses to the World Values Survey in respect of the United States, Germany and Japan. In addition to considerable variation in social concern between the states considered, from a VOC perspective it is shown why social concern is less likely to be a force for ameliorating environmental damage in the United States than in Germany and Japan. This is because enduring national institutional contexts frame firms' coordination strategies and constrain or enable the transmission of social concern for the environment to them. As such, an analytical framework is proposed in which national variations in capitalist relations of production are central to the impact that social concern has on corporate behaviour.