University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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corporate environmental performance may be an indication that the importance of
environmental issues is growing. Therefore, at least some business entities strove to
legitimize their operations in the eyes of the regulatory bodies by making
environmental efforts exceeding their legal responsibilities.
The normative pressure occurs also when businesses act in compliance with social
norms, values and expectations. Outside some regional differences, environmental
awareness in societies is undoubtedly growing with more and more environmental
organizations and the increasing significance of environmental consumerism while
ecological threats affect people’s awareness and conduct. Hence the changing
expectations of businesses: they are expected not only to manufacture goods, render
services and generate profits but also engage in business activities least harmful to
the environment. With reference to the research results, 28.47% of companies
implemented EMSs to meet their clients’ expectations. Over 10% of the respondents
decided that one of the reasons for environmental self-regulation was their
willingness to enhance relations with the local communities. One might say that the
significance of these motivations is smaller than expected; however, they prove that
for some enterprises social expectations are drivers for voluntary actions, often
perceived as CSR.
As the questionnaires (and personal interviews) suggest, 18.86% of the respondents
implemented EMSs after observing other companies’ conduct. This may be the case
when a business faces information asymmetry and uncertainty. The entity takes
notice of its competitors’ conduct and imitates it while remaining unaware of the
purpose for such behaviour or the related costs and benefits. However, a business
entity acts the same way to relieve this uncertainty (Kudłak 2008: 218). Two patterns
of behaviour can be distinguished here (Brown 2005: 6-7):
• competitive imitation when business conduct results from concern about losing
the competitive advantage over competitors if the company remains passive,
• institutional imitation when business conduct results from a concern about losing
the stakeholders’ trust if the company fails to take action.
To sum up, concern about losing the market position or deterioration thereof triggers
off businesses to take CSR-labelled actions (in this particular case, implementing
EMS) and alter their economic operations. Companies tend to keep competing
primarily on price and quality while environmental issues seem to be of growing
importance as well.
One more phenomenon seems to concur which may be a factor inducing businesses
to attend all kinds of voluntary initiatives for the benefit of environmental protection,
namely free-riding. If benefits on account of implementing and certifying EMSs can
be achieved even if actions improving environmental performance are not
undertaken, then a firm can benefit from other enterprises’ participation and their
environmental commitments and efforts. If participants of EMS certification schemes
take actual actions to improve quality of the natural environment and hence create a
positive and valuable image of the management scheme for various stakeholders,
then other businesses may be encouraged to also benefit from participation without
taking actions to improve their environmental performance. They simply implement
and certify EMSs with no efforts whatsoever to lessen their impact on the