We examine greening activities among European small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the product and process domains, and argue that greater public climate concern in an SME's home country environment primarily associates with greening in the inherently more visible product domain. Moreover, we introduce the concept of public inquisitiveness and propose that greater inquisitiveness prompts SMEs to also pay attention to less visible process greening activities as a response to public climate pressures. We test our ideas using multilevel regression models on a large representative sample of SMEs from 18 European Union (EU) countries. The study's main ideas are supported by the findings, which point to possible trade‐offs between product and process greening among resource‐constrained SMEs, and suggest the general public's inquisitiveness indeed plays a key role in preventing under engagement in less outwardly visible greening strategies. We discuss our study's implications for discourse on how and under which conditions normative institutional forces shape firm‐level sustainable behavior, as well as for SMEs' pro‐environmental stakeholders.

中文翻译：

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绿化成为焦点：公众的好奇心如何影响欧洲中小企业应对气候问题的行动


我们研究了欧洲中小企业（SME）在产品和流程领域的绿化活动，并认为公众对中小企业母国环境的更大的气候关注主要与本质上更明显的产品领域的绿化有关。此外，我们引入了公众好奇心的概念，并提出更大的好奇心会促使中小企业也关注不太明显的流程绿化活动，以应对公共气候压力。我们使用多级回归模型对来自 18 个欧盟 (EU) 国家的大量具有代表性的中小企业样本检验我们的想法。该研究的主要观点得到了研究结果的支持，这些研究结果指出了资源有限的中小企业中产品和流程绿色化之间可能存在的权衡，并表明公众的好奇心确实在防止参与不太明显的绿色化战略方面发挥着关键作用。我们讨论了我们的研究对于规范制度力量如何以及在何种条件下塑造企业层面的可持续行为以及中小企业的亲环境利益相关者的影响。