Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The firm as political actor and a theory of private policymaking
- 3 Unveiling the public roots of private policymaking
- 4 The public, the state, and corporate environmentalism
- 5 Public opinion and gay rights in the workplace
- 6 Total executive compensation and regulatory threat
- 7 Conclusion
- Appendix: Data sources and variable measurement by chapter
- References
- Index
4 - The public, the state, and corporate environmentalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The firm as political actor and a theory of private policymaking
- 3 Unveiling the public roots of private policymaking
- 4 The public, the state, and corporate environmentalism
- 5 Public opinion and gay rights in the workplace
- 6 Total executive compensation and regulatory threat
- 7 Conclusion
- Appendix: Data sources and variable measurement by chapter
- References
- Index
Summary
The present risk is clear. The climate appears to be changing, the changes appear to be outside natural variation, and the likely consequences will be serious. Anyone who disagrees is, in my view, still in denial. We at Ford Motor Company have moved on.
– William Clay Ford, Jr., October 2000Only five to ten years earlier, it would have been unthinkable for the chief executive of one of the big three automakers to articulate such a proactive environmental stance on behalf of his firm. Even today, over ten years later, among the mass public and many political elites sympathetic to business, denial of climate change is not exceptional. Over the course of the 1990s, however, large firms increasingly adopted environmental policies that were beyond compliance. Although some critics suggested that such efforts were little more than “greenwashing” – since many such efforts were highly visible but not the most effective (Ramus and Montiel 2005) – there is considerable evidence that many firms' policy shifts were sincere. For example, in the case of Ford, between 1996 and 1998, every one of its plants around the globe instituted an environmental management system that was certified as compliant with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, and in 1999, Ford began to require its suppliers to have at least one facility that was similarly compliant (Eisner 2004). Other firms trying to minimize the environmental impact of their supply chains include Home Depot, Herman Miller, and American Electric Power (Deutsch 2007b).
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- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012