Opportunism and environmental management systems: Certification as a smokescreen for stakeholders

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Stakeholders Opportunism Environmental imbalance Environmental management systems ISO 14001 EMAS This paper sets out to explain how the implementation of an environmental management systems (EMS) conditions the way firms respond to environmental pressures exerted by their stakeholders. While the most common approaches to be found in the literature consider the certification of such systems to be an indicator of proactivity and cooperation with stakeholders, this article posits that it is also a mechanism firms use to discriminate between stakeholders, allowing firms to react to the pressure of certain stakeholders only. Specifically, the analyses conducted on a sample of 3748 plants reveal that the implementation of an EMS responds to pressure from stakeholders, but once this system has been certified a firm's environmental actions basically respond to the pressure from internal primary stakeholders, ignoring pressures from external primary and secondary stakeholders and regulators. The key element in the theoretical line of reasoning regarding these results is the opportunistic behavior associated with certification, given that the certification by itself represents incomplete information. Thus, an EMS can serve as a valuable shield against a majority of stakeholders, since only the pressure of those stakeholders who can verify the effects of such pressure will have an influence on the environmental behavior of firms with a certified EMS. Widespread awareness in recent decades of the impact economic activity has on the environment has led to a toughening of the regulatory framework, as well as to greater surveillance over corporate operations by different stakeholders (Johnstone et al., 2007). Some managers have looked upon this increasingly greater pressure as a market opportunity, thereby triggering far-reaching changes in business management and strategy (Potoski and Prakash, 2009). Stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984) considers the alignment of a firm's goals with those of its stakeholders. Its application within the environmental field leads to one of the issues that have aroused the greatest attention in recent years, namely, to identify those stakeholders that can influence a firm's environmental performance Environmental management encompasses several parts of a firm and may be more or less developed, possibly constituting no more than a subsidiary concern based solely on the minimal application of certain corrective actions or, by contrast, becoming an integral part of the organizational structure through the implementation of an environmental management system (EMS) that may be certified by third parties (Murillo-Luna …