Globalizing Corporate Environmentalism? Convergence and Heterogeneity in Indian Industry

What explains the recent emergence of corporate environmentalism in developing countries? Why have certain firms surpassed others in greening their activities? This article situates the uneven dynamics of corporate greening within a theoretical framework of convergence, firm specificity, and heterogeneity. Through a comparative analysis of firms in three sectors—automobiles, steel, and power—of the Indian economy during the past two decades, I show that corporate greening is rooted in processes of growing international political engagement, market integration, and transnational social communication. Together, these processes have unleashed various economic and sociological convergence dynamics, which have led firms in India to adopt more environmentally sound innovations and performances increasingly similar to those found in many developed countries. Yet firms’ connectedness to external pressures fostering “upward” convergence varies, as do their internal capabilities to respond to them. Heterogeneity in these internal and external variables, and the firm-specific strategies linking them, accounts for much of the unevenness in patterns of corporate environmentalism observed in India.