György Málovics, Izabella Szakálné Kanó, Szabolcs Imreh
CERTIFIED COMPANIES
In the last section we briefly introduce thepreliminary results of our empirical research carried outamong Hungarian ISO 14001 certified SMEs. Ourresearch focused primarily on small- and mediumenterprises (SMEs). Our main aim was to identifysustainability-related stakeholder pressures SMEsexperience from their stakeholders.
The qualitative phase of our study included 8 personalsemi-structured interviews with SME managers from theSouthern Great Plane Region of Hungary. Our interviewstructure was developed based on Matolay et al.’s [36].The quantitative part includes a survey of 66 HungarianSMEs. Our survey was developed on the basis of Konradet al.’s [1]
stakeholder-matrix which aims to mapstakeholders’
sustainability expectations as perceived bythe managers of multinationals.A. Qualitative resultsAccording to our qualitative data we conclude thatthe interviewed managers do not meet any
“classical”sustainability pressures from their stakeholders, excludingthe implementation of the environmental managementsystem. Our results are not surprising since it is evenmore common in the literature that SMEs’ socialresponsibility and their role in sustainability is not seen inimplementing the best practice CSR and sustainabilitymethods of multinational companies – which we called“classical” earlier. These methods are non-applicable forSMEs since SMEs are from a lot of aspects structurallydifferent from multinationals [22]
[23] [3]. Their socialand sustainability role is rather seen in contributing tosocial capital [46] [47].
Among stakeholder (and mutual)expectations we found several values – e.g. calculability,security, trustiness, righteousness and fairness – which arekey values from the aspect of social capital and show thatSMEs in Hungary potentially also contribute to socialcapital.
B. Quantitative results
Our quantitative results somewhat differ from thequalitative ones (unfortunately we do not have a chance togive a detailed analysis of our results here because ofspace limits). Here managers had to classify differentstakeholders’ expectations on a five-grade scale (see table1-3).
Value one meant that the given aspect is not at allimportant for the given stakeholder, while value fivemeant the opposite.As we can see, the most important employeeexpectations are connected to long run secure workplaceand local environmental issues. Also, from the threeexamined stakeholder groups employees have the highestlevel of expectations towards the companies. The localcommunity’s expectations are connected to local issuesand their level is generally lower than employees’expectation. Eventually, consumers have generally thelowest level of expectations and these are mainly relatedto environmental issues.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In our paper we introduced four paradigms ofcorporate sustainability. We concluded that because ofscientific uncertainty regarding the criteria of asustainable corporation - and also because the need forchanging unsustainable present corporate behavior andconsumer preferences - participation has a prominent rolewhen defining the sustainable corporation. Namely,stakeholder expectations gain distinguished importancewhen judging any organizations sustainability. Ourempirical study among Hungarian ISO 14001 certifiedcompanies came to contradictional results. According toour semi-structured interviews companies do notexperience strong sustainability needs from theirstakeholders. On the other hand, employees, localcommunity and consumers all have importantsustainability (environmental) demand according to ourquantitative data.
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