How Does Public Opinion Influence Production Safety within Small and Medium Enterprises in the Sustainability Context?

Safety accidents are a major hazard to the community and impact sustainable development. Production safety, as the basic corporate social responsibility (CSR), is mostly overlooked by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China. The traditional safety management model of SMEs has some loopholes. Therefore, it is critical to explore other non-traditional and effective approaches. With the rapid development of the internet and the wide use of social media, the influence of public opinion on the production safety of SMEs has now become more and more powerful. However, the influence mechanism hasn’t been fully studied and understood. Based on grounded theory, this paper conducted an in-depth study on how SME behavior in production safety is influenced by public opinion. The study found that public opinion influences SME production safety through three channels: public awareness, media response, and government guidance. Public opinion influences the production safety of SMEs through intermediaries such as government supervision, the willingness of SMEs to produce safely, the behavior of employees to participate in safety management, and the self-disciplinary behavior of the industry. The impact of the willingness of SMEs to produce safely is affected by the resource guarantee ability of SMEs, therefore, the limited public opinion resources should be combined with the reality of SMEs through information exchange to promote the optimum game relationship between bodies, in order to make up for the lack of production safety resources capacity of SMEs. The conclusion of this study is crucial in understanding how to improve the production safety of SMEs by the means of public opinion to promote SMEs to engage in sustainability practices and reduce the occurrence of safety problems.