Business Ethics: A Eur Rev. 2019;00:1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/beer | 1 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 | INTRODUCTION The growing environmental awareness of citizens, companies, nations, and society in general to preserve the natural environment since the last quarter of the 20th century, together with the impetus of global events, such as the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and the increas‐ ing interest of management and strategy scholars on the impact of organisations on the natural environment, has led to the emergence of a body of management literature focusing on the relationship between the firm and the natural environment (Aragón‐Correa & Sharma, 2003; Christmann, 2000; Hart, 1995; Klassen & McLaughlin, 1996; Porter & Van der Linde, 1995; Shrivastava, 1995). This phenomenon occurred in parallel with the rise of corporate social responsibility issues as well as growing concern about a firm's public relations and image (Clark, 2000; Clarke & Gibson‐Sweet, 1999), thus signalling the relevance of a firm's strategy and business activities in relation to the environment (Warren, 1999) and its public judgement by external stakeholders, where the firm's reputation, image, and legitimacy are the key organi‐ sational factors. Nevertheless, as Kumar (2018) claims, the mechanism connecting firm environmental strategies to reputational outputs is largely understudied. From an academic perspective, despite the recent and intense development of this growing body of literature, and in particular, the recognition of the essential role of a firm's stakeholders and manag‐ ers' actions in environmental management (EM) decisions (Delmas & Toffel, 2008, Eesley & Lenox, 2006; González‐Benito & González‐ Benito, 2010; Haddock‐Fraser & Tourelle, 2010; Montiel, Husted, & Christmann, 2012, Onkila, 2011; Sharma & Henriques, 2005), con‐ tributions in the EM literature to provide solid theoretical content to the external projection of firms' environmental activities are scarce. In this sense, previous works use several terms to reflect the external projection of the firm. Among them, the concept of “corporate envi‐ ronmental reputation (CER)” comprehensively integrates stakeholder perceptions of firm behaviour in relation to the natural environment. Nevertheless, as we will show below, this construct, sometimes used interchangeably with green corporate image (GCI) or corporate en‐ vironmental legitimacy (CEL) (Chun, 2005; Czinkota, Kaufmann, & Basile, 2014), suffers from a lack of clarity in its conceptualisation, Received: 6 April 2018 | Revised: 11 June 2019 | Accepted: 17 October 2019 DOI: 10.1111/beer.12250 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Corporate environmental reputation: Exploring its definitional landscape Gregorio Martín‐de Castro 1 | Javier Amores‐Salvadó 1 | José E. Navas‐López 1 | Remy M. Balarezo‐Núñez 2 1 Management and Marketing Department, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain 2 Business Policy Department, University of Piura, Miraflores, Peru Correspondence Gregorio Martín‐de Castro and Javier Amores‐Salvadó, Management and Marketing Department, Complutense University of Madrid, Campus Somosaguas, sn, 28223 Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain. Emails: gmartinc@ucm.es; jamores@ccee. ucm.es Funding information Banco Santander‐UCM, Grant/Award Number: Project PR26/16‐15B‐1; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Grant/Award Number: Project ECO2012‐38190 and Project ECO2015‐65251‐ P Abstract Despite its growing strategic importance, the concept of Corporate Environmental Reputation (CER) still lacks a specific definition and content delimitation in the litera‐ ture. This fact, together with its difficult differentiation from other similar constructs, hides the key role of this construct in the connection between management and envi‐ ronmental studies and in the development of corporate environmental management strategies. To address this issue, in this research, we develop a literature review on CER conceptualisation, operationalisation and measurement, and analyse its main ef‐ fects on firm competitiveness and performance drawing on the Institutional Theory and the resource‐based view. As a result, we propose a CER definition, highlighting its main characteristics and drivers and delimitating it in relation to closely related concepts such as green corporate image and corporate environmental legitimacy.