COMMENTARY ON CORPORATE STRATEGIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL-REGULATIONS - ANORGANIZING FRAMEWORK BY RUGMAN,A.M. AND VERBEKE,A

A significant issue that is increasingly affecting the operations of c ompanies is the policies of governments with regard to the natural env ironment and the activities of nongovernmental organizations in promot ing codes of practice and other forms of nonlegal regulation.(1) The o nset of new regulations and codes of conduct is placing significant op erational burdens on firms to merely comply with new requirements and changed circumstances. Furthermore, there is a need in strategic terms to anticipate and to plan for environmental concerns and to incorpora te this thinking into corporate strategy. Thus a new subfield of strat egic management is beginning to emerge: that dealing with the natural environment as it affects corporate strategy. Alan Rugman and Alain Ve rbeke in their paper 'Corporate strategies and environmental regulatio ns' organize the literature on environmental regulations and corporate strategy into a new managerial framework. They go on to develop a res ource-based view of the interaction between the firm's key resources ( core competences) and environmental regulations including the implicat ions for the development of 'green' capabilities. Finally, they analyz e the deployment of 'green' capabilities within a standard internation al business model and explore hypotheses on the relationships between environmental regulations, competitiveness, and corporate strategy. Th e question about how films should respond to environmental regulations can be seen in broad terms as parr of the debate on corporate social responsibility. A fundamental problem in this area has been that there are no definitions of corporate social responsibility or corporate so cial responsiveness that provide a framework or a model for consistent systematic collection, organization, and analysis of corporate data r elating to these important concepts (Clarkson, 1995). (C) 1998 John Wi ley & Sons, Ltd.