The Public as a Definitive Stakeholder of Corporate Green Management?

Abstract

There is an emerging body of literature that links the well-known Varieties of Capitalism framework to the relative propensity of nations to move away from hydrocarbons. This research extends this work through exploring relationship between institutional configurations and what the general public expects from firms with respect to green management. Utilizing a theoretically well-refined recent construct, namely, the Varieties of Institutional Systems, and connecting a multi-country survey of the public-as-stakeholders to institutional configurations from 16 countries (N=7156), we find significant variations of stakeholder expectations across different institutional systems. The findings, however, do not confirm a neat dichotomy between mature and emerging markets, nor that mature institutional systems are necessarily associated with a willingness to hold firms to higher environmental standards. Rather, and somewhat counter-intuitively, we find that stakeholder expectations for green management were the highest in State-Led institutional systems.