| Summary: | In the literature on corporate environmental strategy, the question of how environmental strategies of companies evolve over time remains little explored. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to understand the evolution of corporate environmental strategies of a sample of French retailers from 2000 to 2009, period that extends to the pre and post implementation of the French New Economic Regulations (NRE) law of 2001. This regulatory context is particularly interesting because France adopted a peculiar legislation. Contrary to other European laws, the French NRE law does not prescribe new social or environmental requirements but only informational requirements.
The value of this study lies in its two levels of analysis: firstly the analysis of environmental strategies and secondly a textual analysis of retailers’ publications in order to study how their strategies are disclosed. These distinct levels of analysis enable the study to answer the following research questions: How do corporate environmental strategies evolve over time? How do companies disclose their environmental strategies?
This study finds that corporate environmental strategies disclosed by retailers have a nonlinear evolution. Change occurred in three steps: slight evolution, dramatic evolution, and stagnation. Retailers justify their corporate environmental strategy on the basis of value and financial-based argumentations. But paradoxically, retailers do not mention quantitative financial data. The analysis of disclosed information revealed substantial taboos in disclosed information.
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