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Top1. Introduction
Climate change and environment pollution are among the most serious global challenges nowadays (Environmental Technology, 2018). To prevent and mitigate the effects of such problems, green consumption has been and will play an increasingly important role in humanity's efforts towards a globally sustainable development (Sustainable Development, 2019). In fact, it was and is becoming a familiar shopping option that consumers adopt in not only developed nations but also an emerging country like Vietnam (Vietnam News, 2019). In Vietnam, for example, consumers, in comparison to the last ten years, have had much more knowledge about environmental issues and said no to dirty foods and to brands that may violate moral values (Vietnam News, 2019). When it comes to green consumerism, consumer behaviors are the decisive issue with the note that these behaviors are directly related to the environment and human depletion of natural resources, their patterns of waste in society, their use of public facilities, and even induce industries to develop green manufacturing methods, and so on. It is, therefore, necessary to discuss pro-environmental behaviors in consumer research in specific and business research in generic (Alzubaidi et al., 2021).
Many of the past studies have focused on explaining and predicting pro-environmental behaviors by exploiting value theory in which consumer values and beliefs as the main antecedents, as early framed in Stern (2000) and Stern et al.’s (1995) often-cited model. In another stream of research, which was much promoted by Stets and Biga (2003), have adopted identity theory as the base to have effects on consumer attitude and then on their buying behaviors. It should be noted that, many studies (e.g., Zeiske et al., 2020; Gatersleben et al., 2014) recently brought value theory and identity theory together to understand pro-environmental behaviors.
It is worthy that a more promising approach resides in Bandura’s theory of self-regulation (1977) which is strongly advocated by Bagozzi (1992) as a powerful theoretical framework to investigate human behaviors, especially purposeful or intended behaviors. Numerous empirical studies across many fields over the past decade (for reviews, see Sheeran et al., 2016; Inzlicht et al., 2021) have integrated the substantial constructs (e.g., self-efficacy and personal outcome expectation) from self-regulation with individual psychological variables (like attitudes, norms, values, and beliefs) from attitude theories such as theory of reasoning action or theory of planned behaviors into some sort of comprehensive models to better understand human behaviors.
In the light of this integrative approach which has also been applied to understand pro-environmental behaviors (e.g., Ertz et al., 2016), drawing upon value theory (i.e., value orientations), identity theory (identity), and self-regulation theory (self-efficacy and personal outcome expectation), we investigate this research with desire to build and validate a model of green consumption, a typical case of pro-environmental behavior (Environmental Technology, 2018). Moreover, as both value orientations and pro-environmental behaviors are made up of several components, our second goal is to explore the structural relationships among these components in each construct mentioned.