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Cited by 868

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 14 of the 14 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Social License and Environmental Protection: Why Businesses Go Beyond Compliance

Gunningham, Neil, Kagan, Robert A., Thornton, Dorothy·2004·Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Social Inquiry
DOI 10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00338.x
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Abstract

This article examines the concept of the corporate “social license,” which governs the extent to which a corporation is constrained to meet societal expectations and avoid activities that societies (or influential elements within them) deem unacceptable, whether or not those expectations are embodied in law. It examines the social license empirically, as it relates to one social problem–environmental protection–and as it relates to one particular industry: pulp and paper manufacturing. It shows try the social license is important, the circumstances in which it may encourage companies to go “beyond compliance” with regulation, how its terms are monitored and enforced, and how it interacts with what we term the regulatory and economic licenses. Overall, this research demonstrates that corporate environmental behavior cannot be explained purely in terms of instrumental threats and moral obligations to comply with the law, and that the increasing incidence of “beyond compliance” corporate behavior can be better explained in terms of the interplay between social pressures and economic constraints.

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Metadata

Authors
Gunningham, N., Kagan, R. A., & Thornton, D.
Venue
Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Social Inquiry
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2004-04
Volume
29
Issue
2
Pages
307-341
ISSN
  • 0897-6546 (ISSN-L)
  • 1747-4469
DOI
10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00338.x
OpenAlex
W4246736128
Cited by
868
References
14
FWCI
11.24
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Social License and Environmental Protection: Why Businesses Go Beyond Compliance. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00338.x
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Gunningham, N., Kagan, R. A., & Thornton, D. (2004). Social License and Environmental Protection: Why Businesses Go Beyond Compliance. Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Social Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2004.tb00338.x

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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.