An Integral Approach to Corporate Environmentalism and its Application to a Country in Transition

In this paper we propose and implement an integral approach to corporate environmentalism. Our integral model accounts not only for corporate environmentalism motivation and conception but also for corporate environmentalism mode and speed of implementation. A broad range of identified corporate environmentalism dimensions helps characterize five basic groups of companies we propose to name non-compliers, legalistic incrementalists, greenwashers, incremental innovators, and radical innovators. We then seek to empirically verify the soundness of the proposed integral typology by surveying a large sample of Slovenian manufacturing companies. Maximum likelihood profit estimation, exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis and binary logistic modeling are used in the empirical analysis. Our main conclusions are twofold: (1) The integral approach to corporate environmentalism works: in the framework of a small open transitional economy, the model differentiates well among different groups of companies. (2) There are no radical innovators among Slovenian companies, and less than one third of the companies are actively thinking and acting in line of environment-friendly processes and products. This finding can be partially explained by the fact that Slovenian economy still has some transitional characteristics.