Clusters, Global Value Chains, and the Business Environment: A Hierarchy of Institutional Influence on Small and Medium Enterprise Sustainability

Barbara Caemmerer (), Valentina Stan () and Giorgio Russolillo ()
Additional contact information
Barbara Caemmerer: ESSCA School of Management, Paris
Valentina Stan: ESSCA School of Management, Paris
Giorgio Russolillo: CEDRIC - MSDMA - CEDRIC. Méthodes statistiques de data-mining et apprentissage - CEDRIC - Centre d'études et de recherche en informatique et communications - ENSIIE - Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique pour l'Industrie et l'Entreprise - Cnam - Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers [Cnam]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: ABSTRACT Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) dominate the global business landscape, making their sustainability efforts crucial. Yet little is known about how institutional contexts shape these practices. Using Institutional Theory, we compare the influence of cluster membership (CM), global value chain (GVC) membership, and the organizational business environment (OBE) on SMEs' implementation of sustainability practices. Data from 12,326 SME decision‐makers in the European Union—collected via computer‐assisted telephone interviewing (CATI)—were extracted from the Eurostat Flash Eurobarometer 486. We use ordinal logistic regression to model SME sustainability practices as a function of CM, GVC membership, and the OBE, and dominance analysis to compare their relative influence. Findings show a hierarchy of contextual influence: CM has the strongest association, followed by GVC membership, while that of the OBE is relatively weak. These insights support efforts to expand SME cluster development and GVC integration to accelerate sustainable transformation and meet EU sustainability objectives.

Keywords: business environment clusters global value chains Institutional Theory SMEs sustainability; business environment; clusters; global value chains; Institutional Theory; SMEs; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-sbm
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://cnam.hal.science/hal-05585592v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Business Strategy and the Environment, 2026, ⟨10.1002/bse.70839⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://cnam.hal.science/hal-05585592v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05585592

DOI: 10.1002/bse.70839

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().