Greening in the spotlight: How public inquisitiveness shapes European SMEs' actions in response to climate concerns
研究了欧洲中小企业中产品与流程绿色化活动，发现公众气候关注主要推动更显性的产品绿色化，而公众好奇心则促使企业也关注隐性流程绿色化，揭示了资源受限下的权衡。
Abstract We examine greening activities among European small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the product and process domains, and argue that greater public climate concern in an SME's home country environment primarily associates with greening in the inherently more visible product domain. Moreover, we introduce the concept of public inquisitiveness and propose that greater inquisitiveness prompts SMEs to also pay attention to less visible process greening activities as a response to public climate pressures. We test our ideas using multilevel regression models on a large representative sample of SMEs from 18 European Union (EU) countries. The study's main ideas are supported by the findings, which point to possible trade‐offs between product and process greening among resource‐constrained SMEs, and suggest the general public's inquisitiveness indeed plays a key role in preventing under engagement in less outwardly visible greening strategies. We discuss our study's implications for discourse on how and under which conditions normative institutional forces shape firm‐level sustainable behavior, as well as for SMEs' pro‐environmental stakeholders.