Environmental Strategy,Media Attention,and Corporate Environmental Performance

Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,China has taken the construction of ecological civilization as an important part of the "Five-in-One" national strategy and green development as one of the "Five Development Ideas".deepening the cognition of environmental protection and accelerating the process of ecological civilization construction in China.Although listed companies in China’s heavily polluting industries have made important contributions to China’s economic growth,they have also brought a series of environmental problems that are difficult to reverse,and have become the focus of attention of government regulatory agencies,the public,and the media.In the context of vigorously advocating a green economy today,companies have begun to raise environmental issues to a strategic level in order to maintain their long-term survival and development.However,in the process of the performance consequences of the enterprise’s environmental strategy change,there are problems such as strategic fit and implementation,it is necessary to explore whether the environmental strategy implemented is conducive to improving environmental performance.At the same time,among the factors affecting corporate behavioral decision-making,the media as an important external monitoring force,through the reporting of company information,forced the company to expose itself to the public’s sight,which softly constrained the company’s behavior,thereby media have a certain corporate governance function,then whether the media has played the same role in the environmental problems faced by the company.Therefore,what this article wants to study is:(1)whether the implementation of environmental strategies will improve the environmental performance of enterprises,and whether there are significant differences in performance effects brought about by different types of environmental strategies;(2)under the supervision of public opinion,media attention improve the environmental performance of the company by improving the environmental behavior of the company or not.It is proposed to explore the relationship between media attention,environmental strategy and environmental performance by solving the above problems,which has important theoretical and practical significance for constructing China’s environmental strategic system,guiding sustainable development of enterprises,and regulating media governance behavior.From the perspective of combining macro and micro,this article is based on the green orientation of the world,the green determination of the country and the green business opportunities of the company as the research background.Use the sustainabledevelopment theory,stakeholder theory,legitimacy theory,contingency theory,agenda setting theory as theoretical basis,we will take the listed companies in the A-shares heavily polluting industries in Shanghai and Shenzhen in 2014-2018 as research samples to explore the relationship between media attention,environmental strategy and environmental performance.The main research contents are as follows: First,this article summarizes the relevant research literature on corporate environmental strategy,delves into the nature of environmental strategy from the two dimensions of environmental cognition and action,and designs a reasonable environmental strategy evaluation system to divide environmental strategy into reactive and defensive Four types: reactive,defensive,adaptive,and proactive;Secondly,by constructing an ordered multiple logit regression model,we explore the difference in the effects of different environmental strategy types on environmental performance;Then,we introduce media attention,as an external governance variable.use the mediation effect model to test whether there is a mediation effect between media attention,environmental strategy choices and environmental performance;further,use text analysis to distinguish media reports from positive reports and negative reports to explore whether they bring different effect in the mediation effects;finally,use Python Technological methods have changed the measurement method of media attention,and the empirical results have not changed substantially,confirming the robustness of the research conclusions.The following conclusions are obtained through empirical tests: First,At present,in the heavily polluting industries in China,the number of companies implementing reactive environmental strategies is gradually decreasing,while the number of companies implementing proactive environmental strategies is increasing.but most companies are still in between reactive and proactive environmental strategies;Second,proactive environmental strategies can significantly improve environmental performance.Different types of environmental strategies have different degrees of impact on environmental performance,and ranked as follows: proactive>adaptive≈defensive>reactive;Third,the media,as an information intermediary for various stakeholders,promotes the implementation of proactive environmental strategies,thereby improving the environmental performance of the company.some media positive reports both can improve environmental performance through environmental strategic transformation,and can directly affect environmental performance.Negative media reports will completely improve environmental performance through environmental strategic transformation.Finally,this paper combines the problems and empirical research results of thecurrent state of China ’s environmental strategy,and proposes targeted improvement suggestions from the following three perspectives: First,from the perspective of listed companies,to deepen corporate environmental protection awareness and implement active environmental strategies.Second,from the perspective of government departments,to improve environmental laws and regulations,and strengthen the punishment of government departments;third,from the perspective of public opinion media,to improve external market supervision and actively play media governance functions.