دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 6051
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

صدور گواهینامه و سرمایه گذاری در زنجیره ی تامین شیوه های مدیریت زیست محیطی ایزو 14000: شناسایی تفاوت در سطح انگیزه و پذیرش بین شرکت های اروپای غربی و آمریکای شمالی

عنوان انگلیسی
ISO 14000 certification and investments in environmental supply chain management practices: identifying differences in motivation and adoption levels between Western European and North American companies
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
6051 2012 11 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : Journal of Cleaner Production, Available online 25 January 2012

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
- مسائل زیست محیطی - مدیریت زنجیره تامین - توسعه پایدار
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  صدور گواهینامه و سرمایه گذاری در زنجیره ی تامین شیوه های مدیریت زیست محیطی ایزو 14000: شناسایی تفاوت در سطح انگیزه و پذیرش بین شرکت های اروپای غربی و آمریکای شمالی

چکیده انگلیسی

The adoption of an environmental management system (EMS) such as ISO 14000 is generally assumed to be part of a wider effort to reduce the supply chain’s environmental impacts. EMS can be divided into externally certified systems such as ISO 14000 and investments in internal EMS programs. It has been suggested that the adoption and implementation patterns for these systems vary based on motivational differences. Furthermore, there is also evidence suggesting that these motivational differences might lead to differences in EMS investment patterns between organizations situated in North America and Western Europe. This research explores differences in EMS adoption and investments in North America and Western Europe to gain a greater understanding of companies’ environmental motivations. More specifically, through survey data this research explores the differences in ISO 14000 certification and environmental supply chain investment levels between Western European and North American companies. Our results indicate that ISO 14000 is universally adopted as part of wider efforts to reduce supply chain environmental impacts, not as a legitimating tool.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Ignoring environmental issues is no longer an option for most if not all organizations (Kleindorfer et al., 2005 and Pagell and Wu, 2009). However, how organizations decide to respond to pressures to be greener can and does vary. There are organizations that have made legitimate attempts to significantly reduce the impact of their supply chains, but there is also evidence that some organizations create a veneer of being green while actually continuing to do business in traditional unsustainable ways (Hopkins, 2009). Being able to distinguish between these situations as well as being able to judge which environmental initiatives are legitimate is then of vital importance. The problem of determining legitimacy is critical, especially when discussing environmental management systems (EMS) such as ISO 14000, the most widely known and adopted environmental certification (Nawrocka et al., 2009). Research indicates that companies seek certification for themselves or demand it of their suppliers to improve environmental performance, to help with meeting regulation and to reduce the risk of supplier non-conformance (e.g. Pagell and Gobeli, 2009 and Seuring, 2004). The existence of an EMS, especially a certified EMS such as ISO 14000 is then viewed as an externally verified proxy for effective environmental management by members of the supply chain as well as stakeholders external to the supply chain (Corbett and Kirsch, 2001 and Jacobs et al., 2010). However, there is also evidence that some suppliers adopt ISO 14000 primarily as a marketing tool, with little to no change in their actual environmental practices or outcomes (Jiang and Bansal, 2003). For instance Boiral (2007) found that the Canadian organizations in his sample did not adopt ISO 14000 to improve their environmental management or reduce their environmental impacts. Instead the certification was used to gain legitimacy with stakeholders. Having ISO 14000 was used to signal that the supplier was doing what was expected to manage environmental issues, yet in these instances that was not actually the case. Boiral’s (2007) results merit further study for two main reasons. First, Matten and Moon (2008) use institutional theory to propose that the institution of nation will lead to different types of sustainability strategies in different places. They propose that North American organizations will have explicit sustainability strategies that are clearly communicated, while European organizations will have implicit strategies that are not communicated. In the context of EMS this suggests that European suppliers would be far less likely to adopt ISO 14000 mainly to explicitly signal to customers/the marketplace that they are taking environmental action. Rather, one would expect that if Europeans spent the time and resources required to achieve ISO 14000 certification that they would do so in order to actually improve their environmental management (Boiral, 2007 and Matten and Moon, 2008). However, North American suppliers would be much more likely to adopt an EMS such as ISO 14000 as a marketing tool. This is what Boiral concluded, but because Boiral’s sample is confined to North America it is unknown if this behavior is confined to North America or occurs globally. The second reason for exploring this issue further relates to the nature of ISO 14000 as compared to other management systems based on ISO standards, especially ISO 9000. Some researchers have argued for significant parallels between ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 (Klassen and McLaughlin, 1996). Similar to quality, a long-term goal of environmental management is to move toward a proactive management stance. Environmental aspects are considered as a management system integrated in product design, the entire manufacturing process, marketing, product delivery and use, customer service, and post consumer product disposition (Hunt and Auster, 1990 and Sroufe and Curkovic, 2008). Using this line of logic one would expect that ISO 14000 would follow a similar trajectory as ISO 9000. When ISO 9000 was becoming the defacto quality standard, there were debates as to the merits of this certification (Casadesus et al., 2008). Some authors argued that ISO 9000 was mainly paperwork driven and did not improve quality and hence was adopted mainly because customers demanded it ( Han et al., 2007 and McGuire and Dilts, 2008). Others argued that ISO 9000 could actually be obtained to manage and improve quality ( Naveh and Erez, 2006 and Terlaak and King, 2006). Today, it is accepted that the adoption of ISO 9000, while never a guarantee for higher quality, is an indicator of the existence of a functioning and effective process based quality management system (Benner and Veloso, 2008). Therefore, if ISO 14000 follows the same trajectory as ISO 9000 it could be assumed that the debates over the merits of ISO 14000 might dissipate as the standard becomes more widespread (Mueller et al., 2009). However, assuming that ISO 14000 will work the same way as ISO 9000 and hence will follow the same path to widespread adoption ignores one important difference. ISO 9000 with its emphasis on quality is focused on creating a management system to improve quality. This is something the focal customer of the supply chain both can assess themselves and about which they care deeply (Pagell et al., 2010). However, ISO 14000 is directed at something that is much harder for the focal customer to assess and many may not care about, especially in B2B relationships. However, if they did care it would be to mitigate their own risk and not to actually reduce the environmental impact of the supply chain. In other words, being able to say we did our due diligence by requiring our suppliers to be certified may be all that is required for legitimacy. Therefore, there seems to be greater scope for an organization to use ISO 14000 only for legitimating purposes. This research draws especially on Boiral’s (2007) and Matten and Moon’s (2008) work to further explore the motivational differences and levels of adopting ISO 14000 between Western European and North American companies. Theory suggests that the drivers and outcomes of ISO 14000 adoption could vary between North America and Western Europe, even if adoption rates did not (Boiral, 2007 and Matten and Moon, 2008). North Americans would adopt ISO 14000 to show legitimacy and as a marketing tool while Western Europeans would adopt mainly to make actual environmental improvements to their operations and supply chain (Boiral, 2007 and Matten and Moon, 2008). In this research we directly address this supposition by looking at how ISO 14000 adoption affects the level of investment in environmental supply chain management (ESCM) practices. We study ISO 14000 because it allows us to gain insights into the rationale for EMS adoption. Being ISO 14000 certified is by nature explicit and the information is available to the public (Corbett et al., 2003). Based on the theory of Matten and Moon (2008) and the results in Boiral (2007) and Jackson and Apostolakou (2010), when ISO 14000 is adopted primarily as a marketing/legitimacy tool we would expect lower levels of investments in other practices associated with EMS relative to when ISO 14000 is adopted as part of a broader effort to develop a fully functioning EMS. An examination of organizational efforts in regards to ISO 14000 and other practices associated with EMS allows for an examination of what can be viewed as the organization’s EMS orientation. EMS orientation builds on well-developed literature that links managerial values, cognitions and intentions to the adoption of environmental actions (e.g. Klassen and Whybark, 1999 and Wu and Pagell, 2011). ISO 14000 is then the external component of an organization’s EMS orientation. Investment in other ESCM practices associated with EMS is the internal component of EMS orientation. Investments show intent (Hamel and Prahalad, 1989), making actual investments a good proxy for the intent of ISO 14000 certification (see Table 1). Therefore, this research tries to answer the following research questions: (1) Do Western European and North American companies have the same level of adoption of ISO 14000 and other ESCM practices? and (2), do European and North American companies adopt ISO 14000 for different reasons?To address these research questions we use survey data collected from a range of countries in Western Europe (Germany, Austria, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland) and North America (United States, Canada and Mexico).

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

The results shed critical insight into the adoption of ISO 14000. In this sample the adoption of ISO 14000 is linked to increased environmental investments regardless of facility location. We find no evidence to support the contention that in certain regions ISO is mainly a legitimating tool. Our results show that when buyers chose a supplier partially because of ISO 14000 certification that they should expect the supplier to be making honest and significant efforts to improve the environmental performance of their operations. This does not mean that there are no organizations which are certified but not investing in improving their operation’s environmental performance, but it does indicate that worries that ISO 14000 is being miss-used in general are unfounded; decision makers can view ISO 14000 as an indicator of a functioning EMS. This research has important implications for managers and researchers. From a managerial perspective the critical implication of the results is that ISO 14000, in general, is a valuable certification. Buying firms can assume that suppliers with such certifications will indeed (again on average) be actively working to control and reduce their environmental impacts. And for firms considering certification that have hesitated because they were uncertain of the actual value, our results show that getting certified will indeed be more than a legitimating exercise. Equally important region, at least when comparing North America to Europe does not influence the results, implying that ISO 14000 certifications from Europe are equal to those from North America in terms of indicating a functioning EMS. In addition to the practical implications of our results, this research also points to the need for significant further study. The results of this study show that the institution of country or region is not influencing the motivation for adopting ISO 14000; in both regions adoption of ISO 14000 leads to a complete EMS orientation. In a sense then these results would imply that if there are institutional effects in general when it comes to responsibility strategies, that the institution of ISO 14000 is a stronger driver than locale. Much like ISO 9000 helped to drive the quality revolution a critical implication of our research is that ISO 14000 may drive facilities to become more environmentally sustainable. Future research needs to address this by examining more encompassing indicators of EMS orientation than ISO 14000, as well as expanding to a more comprehensive definition of responsibility that includes both environmental and social concerns. Additionally, while environmental initiatives and certifications such as ISO 14000 are well researched, the social aspects of sustainability are not well understood (Seuring and Mueller, 2008). Social initiatives and certifications such as OHSAS 18001 might have a significant impact on the way supply chains are managed but their interplay with other certifications such as ISO 14000 and ISO 9000 has not been explored. This implies that future research needs to expand beyond an EMS orientation to a sustainability orientation to truly understand the motivations and outcomes of adopting a responsibility strategy (Chen et al., 2009). Future research will also have to address some of the limitations of this study. For example, while the sample does include all of the major North American economies, it does not provide coverage of all of Western Europe. For instance, both France and Spain are not included in the sample. Moreover, taking into account the current and forecasted development of the world economy it would also be of importance to explore the interplay between ISO 14000 and other ESCM practices in an Asian setting. In addition, the GMRG data collection effort is cross sectional in nature. It is entirely possible that ISO 14000 (and by extension ISO 9000) are the result of, rather than the driver of, other investments in ESCM. If this is the case we would except to see significant differences among organizations that adopted ISO 14000 as a way to help solidify existing investments in ESCM as compared to organizations that were either pushed into ISO 14000 by customers and or for legitimacy reasons alone. A further limitation of the research is that our ISO indicators measure the extent to which the plant has invested resources into obtaining certification. Measures of this nature have precedent in the literature (Melnyk, et al., 2003) but are not nearly as common asking if the plant has obtained certification, which makes linking our results directly to some previous studies more difficult. However, to better test a theory and truly understand phenomena scientists need to measure the constructs of interest in multiple ways to show that the results are not just due to measurement choices (Kerlinger, 1986 and Pagell and Krause, 2004). The inability to make easy comparisons to other studies is then of course a limitation, but that is mitigated by the stronger theoretical foundation we are helping to build by addressing ISO in multiple ways. Furthermore, the data is unlikely to be a truly random sample of the population of manufacturing firms in the countries studied so future research will be well served by better sampling. Additionally, the majority of the companies in our sample is small or medium sized. This begs the questions as to whether or not our results can be generalized to larger plants. Future research may emphasize on exploring the role of size on differences in adoption levels and motivation for ISO 14000 and ESCM practices. Despite these limitations, this paper makes a significant contribution by exploring how and why Western European and North American organizations use EMS in general and ISO 14000 specifically.