Can corporate environmental management benefit from multirelationship social network? An improved maturity model and text mining based on the big data from Chinese enterprises

Environmental management has become increasingly important for enterprises and has been considered and influenced by stakeholders. Most studies have examined the impact of a single relationship network on enterprises’ environmental management behavior. This paper establishes a conceptual framework including the direct impact of multirelationship social networks on the maturity of environmental management and the mediating role of absorptive capacity based on stakeholder theory, social network theory and the resource-based view. Using more than 400,000 big data texts, including announcements, social responsibility reports and annual reports issued by China’s high energy-consuming enterprises during 2010–2018, we construct a multirelationship social network, investigate the heterogeneity of environmental management by an improved maturity model, and conduct regression analysis to verify the conceptual model. The results show that (1) the network breadth of most enterprises is 7 or 8; the network depth and knowledge heterogeneity are between 500–1000 and 0.5–0.6, respectively; (2) the number of enterprises in the initial level of environmental management has decreased significantly, but the number in the leading level has not increased appreciably, as expected; (3) most enterprises tend to take measures of pollution reduction and energy savings, but green offices such as creating a safer and healthier workplace for their employees are rarely chosen; and (4) the breadth, depth and knowledge heterogeneity of the network can improve environmental management, and the absorptive capacity has a partial mediating effect on this relationship. Finally, several implications are proposed. The importance of multirelationship social network should be recognized and actively reflected through various channels. Measures of green offices or environmental certification can be considered. Enterprises should strive to strengthen their absorptive capacity from the resources in the social network to optimize their environmental management capacity.