Business and Public Policy: Responses to Environmental and Social Protection Processes

Description

It is increasingly common for businesses to face public policies and government regulation that demand some form of environmental or social protection. These protective public policies have grown in number, complexity, and stringency over the last few decades, not only in industrialized countries but also in the developing world. In this 2010 book, Jorge Rivera presents a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between protective public policies and business compliance. This framework explains different levels of business compliance in terms of three different factors: the link between the stages of protective public policies and different levels of business resistance, the effect of country context, and the effect of firm-level characteristics. The second part of the book supports and elaborates on this framework by presenting empirical studies that examine two voluntary environmental programs: the US ski industry's Sustainable Slopes Program and the Certification for Sustainable Tourism in Costa Rica.

Review of the hardback: 'Jorge Rivera offers an ambitious and welcome contribution to the literature on corporate environmentalism. Where most academic work in this area focuses on industrialized nations, Rivera's book shifts the lens towards the developing world. He provides careful analysis with both breadth - how variations in specific country characteristics moderate corporate response to public policies - and depth - how firm level characteristics vary the type of response. Further, he blends theoretically grounded analysis in institutional theory and policy science with careful empirical analysis of voluntary corporate programs in the US and Costa Rica. The result is a thorough and rigorous piece of work that should be of interest to scholars in this rapidly growing domain of study.' Andrew J. Hoffman, Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan Review of the hardback: 'For anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of how and why firms the world over have softened their opposition to environmental regulatory demands and adopted more conciliatory stands, this book is a must. It is not just about how businesses participate in the public policy process. It is about how they have internalized public policy and other pressures to upgrade their environmental performance. It provides rigorous theoretical and empirical answers to important questions such as: which firms are the better environmental performers; what drives their environmental performance; and does their environmental performance yield benefits to these companies.' Alfred Marcus, Edson Spencer Professor of Strategy and Technological Leadership, University of Minnesota