| Abstract | The concern on environmental issues in business practices has largely been one of rhetoric rather than action. While it is difficult for business throughout the world to refute the general need to conform with the sustainable development paradigm, to date there has been little practical guidance as to how real progress might be made. The need now is to develop patterns and practical solutions to meet the challenge of sustainable development. Businesses are central to the problems and to the solutions. Changing business practices to more sustainable ones can ensure prosperous future of the society. Indeed, the involvement of business is crucial if the world is to achieve sustainable development. Private firms, not governments, choose, develop, implement, and understand technology and management to manipulate world's resources and environment. Hence, responsible business firms may turn out to be among the global leaders in the transition between unsustainable and sustainable development. To begin with, the question to be asked is "who is responsible for an organizational decision making regarding green issues?" Normally, for all of public and private firms, the decision comes from the top management, owners, or shareholders. He or she, with all the information needed and influences from various sources, decides how a firm moves in a specific direction provided that the action enhances organization's survival and profitability. The influences on green decisions may come from two sources. First, from "within" his or her perception and vision, second, from "outside" such as organizational characteristics, regulations, and various stakeholders' influences. Previous studies in some western countries revealed the determinants of the environmentally responsible firms and indicated that green practices in business were positively influenced by customer pressure, shareholder pressure, government regulatory pressure, and community group pressure but negatively influenced by other lobby group pressure sources and a firm's sales-to-asset ratio. They also found that organizational characteristic, such as size and sector, to be relevant factors. However, there has never been a similar study in this part of the world to compare the findings of the previous studies. The study is therefore an attempt to deal with factors that influence the decision and practices of business regarding environmental and sustainable issues especially in developing part of the world. Phuket Province, Thailand is chosen to be a study area since the area is unique in the sense that it is one of the world's famous tourism destinations and at the same time comprising of various businesses apart from tourism-related businesses. Thus, the long-term prospect of Phuket is therefore depends on environmental quality of the area. 276 sample firms are selected from the total business population of 962 in the area. These samples are then classified in terms of sectors and sizes. The possible factors influencing green activities of business are pre-identified by previous studies and by the stakeholders' influences approach. The structured interviews with the firms followed by site observations are made in order to find the relationship between the perceived influence of the factors and the relative degree of environmental activities. The patterns of relationship hence reveal the factors that actually influence the green activities in various business sectors and sizes. All businesses have a strong perception on national and local environmental regulations, business location, community's environmental demand, and a demand for business and personal image as the factors that influence their environmental activities. However, further investigation reveals that different business categories have unique sets of influencing factors. The larger the business, the larger the set of influencing factors. The business sectors that deal mostly with international customers, i.e., tourism, most of the manufacturing firms, and some of the agricultural firms, also tends to have larger set of influencing factors. The study found several conclusions based on each group of influencing factors. The regulatory-related factors influence green activities in medium and large size businesses but have less influence on small and services businesses. The customer-related factors also influence environmental activities in larger firms and tourism business. In contrast, the community-related factors influence the smaller business, services business, and tourism business since the businesses' viability depends largely on acceptability of communities. The efficiency-related factors influence large tourism and manufacturing businesses. This conclusion is also valid for the business partner-related factors and the employee-related factors. The location-related factors influence all business categories in general. However, businesses that aware of their impact on the environment are the large manufacturing firms and the agricultural firms. The conclusions of the study also reveal the fact that for each business category, there are different sets of factor that influence the environmental activities. The internal factors, which related to the economic and voluntary decision of business, appear to influence the business with a relatively low environmental impact such as service industries and small business. On the other hand, the external factors, or the factors that influence the business from outside the organization such as laws and regulations (i.e., the command-and-control approach) appear to influence the business with a relatively high environmental impact such as manufacturing and large business. In short, the study provides a specific perspective on the greening of business in developing country's context. |