University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

794
Interestingly though, and despite their focus on operations and efficiency and the
support available in these areas, few small SMEs engage and interact with
environmental support organisations. This is despite the group’s self-assessment of
their need for assistance and comment on the areas where support is needed (E.g.
energy, waste, water and air pollution). As the relationship between mediating
factors is a two-way one (as shown in Figure 3), the current use of support by small
SMEs may not be just result from an environment attitude/understanding or SME
‘problem’. The situation may also result from the support offer (i.e. how it is
communicated and by whom) and the lack of tailoring of the offer to the needs of the
group (with, for example, the national organisations noted not clearly segmenting
their offers). Any interaction, and this process, will also, potentially, be moderated
by, for example, individual and SME’s resources (E.g. time, people) and
competences of SMEs and the individuals within (i.e. experience and understanding
of how to access support).
To further illuminate and support, and despite the group’s identified propensity to act
based on legal requirements, the overall legal awareness of small SMEs was assessed
to be minimal and few SMEs actually used external support to aid their
understanding (E.g. the Netregs site). Furthermore, and again despite reported action
based on customer requirements, correlations do not support a clear link between the
monitoring of needs and incidences of action based on requirements. Specifically,
many small SMEs suggest they monitor their customer requirements and many do
take action, however, these factors/areas are not linked at the level of the firm (i.e.
individual firms who say they monitor their customer requirements and who also
take action).
Linked to their use of support, their internal focus and issues of awareness (i.e. of
laws and self-assessed internal problems), a further concern for the grouping is their
apparent limited engagement with knowledge creation and sharing activities (with
links to Petts et al, 1998 and learning/knowledge creation processes, for example).
In this overall context, and as noted above, small SMEs were the least likely
grouping in the chain to create knowledge about the environment through reviews
and were least likely to audit their activities to refine and develop their understanding.
Small SMEs also had few environment committees and few undertook specific staff
training (i.e. to share knowledge and encourage challenge of current truths and
facilitate learning); although they were more likely to have emergency plans and
tests (with these often linked to health and safety). Consequently the 55% group
suggested that staff were not aware of environmental impacts/risks and many did not
know what their overall level of staff awareness/understanding there was. The size
and complexity of SMEs in this grouping may influence this (i.e. these organisations
are relatively small and are informal in many of their activities) and they may be seen
not to need the formality of management systems and procedures to manage the
complexity evident in larger SMEs and organisation.
What the above suggests, therefore, is that SME are taking some action to address
the environment and that there is an interaction between internal and external factors;
current activity is, however, internal and operations/efficiency focussed and little
action appears to actually be driven by external factors. It is also proposed that some
form of sense-making is occurring related to this situation (the situation as perceived