Fragmented institutional fields and their impact on manufacturing environmental practices

In the extant literature, manufacturing environmental practices have been attributed to institutional pressures. This study extends this view by observing how different levels of the institutional field (national level vs. regional market level) would have varied effects on manufacturing environmental practices. We empirically investigate, using structural equation modelling, how different types of the manufacturing environmental practices react differently to pressures from a fragmented institutional field. Two distinct types of manufacturing environmental practices occur at the administrative planning operation and technical core operation. Our results confirm such manufacturing environmental practices at different operations lead to different performance benefits–the administrative environmental planning (AEPs) benefit market growth, whereas the technical core environmental practice (TEP) benefit the environment. National-level pressures do not lead to manufacturing environmental practices. Instead, the findings show that institutional pressures at the regional market level influence both types of manufacturing environmental practices. In the contribution, our study has offered an empirical examination of a fragmented institutional field and the impact on two types of manufacturing environmental practices. Further, we also explicitly identified AEPs that lead to market growth and TEPs that create environmental improvement.