Regulatory institutional influence on corporate environmental management in China

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger empirical study grounded on senior managers’ perceptions of corporate environmental management (CEM) and reporting in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). ‘Coercive Government Institutional Involvements’ emerged as one of the major influencing themes in CEM. The State regulatory regime has been perceived by Chinese managers to be the most influential, most complex, and least predictable on organisational environmental performance. The implications being that environmental management systems that work in developed nations should not be directly transplanted to developing nations without considering institutional contexts. Notwithstanding its dynamic economic boom and modernisation, the state still exerts institutional influence on CEM.