Does Size Matter?

Does size matter in explaining firms’ environmental responsiveness? Are large corporations more likely to engage with green issues for fear of losing stakeholder support? Are bigger companies greener because they have more resources to devote to environmental problems? Environmental management researchers routinely include company size in empirical studies of environmental responsiveness, but with mixed empirical results. This thesis argues that explaining the ambiguous relationship between organization size and environmental responsiveness depends on disaggregation. Researchers should examine alternative explanations for the size-responsiveness relationship, different levels of analysis, and distinct types of environmental responsiveness. As organizations have increasingly engaged with environmental issues throughout the 1990s, researchers have generated more and more empirical studies on the predictors of environmental responsiveness. Firms are environmentally responsive to different degrees because of, among others, institutional pressures, internal organizational attributes such as organizational structure or capabilities, managerial characteristics, or costbenefit considerations.