Research On Environmental Strategy Choice And Evolution Of Heavy Polluting Enterprises Based On Institutional Pressure

In recent years,the number of documents on environmental regulations and regulations in China has increased,the media has paid more attention to environmental incidents,and shareholders’ suggestions on environmental protection have also increased.The environmental protection system has the characteristics of diversified subjects,integrated tools,and increased intensity.The continuous increase of institutional pressure has enabled a few heavily polluting enterprises to upgrade their environmental strategies.For example,through the use of advanced environmental management technologies and concepts,research and development of high-quality green products,reducing the environmental load on the supply chain,and becoming an environmental leader,there are still a large number of enterprises.Implementing a passive environmental strategy,even ignoring national laws,government regulation,and public supervision,has serious pollution violations.It can be seen that the changes in institutional pressure have promoted the environmental strategic transformation of heavily polluting enterprises,and similar institutional pressures have triggered the heterogeneous response of environmental strategies of heavily polluting enterprises.This study attempts to answer the question: How do heavy polluting companies make environmental strategic choices when dealing with external institutional pressures?Firstly,the types of environmental strategies of heavy polluting enterprises and their judgment conditions are sorted out.On this basis,the paper analyzes the impact of different institutional pressures on the environmental strategies of heavily polluting enterprises from a static perspective,the heterogeneous environmental strategic response of enterprise organizational redundancy,asset-specificity,and life cycle stages to the institutional pressure,and then 597 listed companies were selected from heavily polluting industries in China,and the environmental strategy was manually coded through the listed corporate social responsibility report.A number of Logit models were used for empirical research.Further,taking into account the dynamic nature of strategic choices,the exploratory vertical single case study is used tosystematically and comprehensively analyze the environmental strategic transformation process of TISCO Group,revealing the evolution path and dynamics of environmental strategies of heavily polluting enterprises,thus establishing a relatively complete The theoretical model of dynamic selection of environmental strategies.The study draws the following conclusions:(1)Government policy pressure has a significant positive impact on the selection of positive environmental strategies for heavily polluting enterprises;the greater the regulatory pressure and public pressure,the more inclined the company chooses pollution-defense or environmental leadership strategies compared to reactive strategies;As regulatory pressures or public pressures continue to increase,companies choose pollution prevention and environmental leadership strategies without differences;(2)Asset specificity positively moderates the relationship between institutional pressures and environmental strategies for heavily polluting companies;(3)policy pressure,The pressure of supervision and public pressure is greater,the more mature enterprises tend to choose the environmental leadership environmental strategy;(4)The environmental strategy evolution of heavy polluting enterprises can not only transition from low-level to advanced,but also may present “reactive type to pollution defense type to environmental leadership to pollution defense type to environmental leadership type”,which has spiral rise characteristics;(5)The driving forces of environmental strategy evolution of heavily polluting enterprises are mainly due to the continuous changes of the external institutional environment and market environment and the changes in environmental awareness of corporate management;(6)There are two different forms of evolution of environmental strategy:induced and emergent strategy,and induced environmental strategy formation follows the“institutional pressure-environmental awareness-strategy”.The theoretical logic of the formation is that the degree of competition in the market environment is not higher than the regulation in the institutional environment.When the level of competition beyond the strength of environmental regulation and relatively low corporate manager of environmental awareness,environmental strategies emerged formula easier to form,and this is showing the evolution of the strategic environment dynamic spiral.Corporate strategy is the core issue in the management field.Facing the urgent need of heavy polluting enterprises to solve environmental pollution problems,environmental strategy has become a new trend in the field of strategic management.In the study of environmental strategy,this study is no longer limited to the study of the relationship between environmental strategy and environmental performance and financial performance,but more concerned about the heterogeneous choice of environmental strategy and the evolution of environmental strategy from reactive to environmental leadership.It has enriched the content of environmental strategic management in theory and guided the green transformation and upgrading of China’s heavily polluting enterprises from the micro level.