The last decade of the 20th century witnessed rapid growth in the adoption of various environmental management systems (EMS) within organisations. Environmental consultants and auditors play an intricate role in the interpretation, implementation and certification of an EMS. This paper presents the experiences of eight leading auditors with respect to the adoption of EMS/ISO 14001 by Australian...

In this paper, we respond to calls by previous researchers to clarify the function of decentralized institutions by analyzing the strategic motives of individual actors. We investigate an important type of decentralized institution – certified management standards – and theorize that firms will use these institutions to reduce problems that might arise with exchange partners that lack informati...

There is no doubt that the interest that ISO standard has aroused in the academic field has its parallel in industry. Up to the end of December 2009, at least 1,064,785 ISO 9001 (2000 and 2008) certificates had been issued in 178 countries and economies. The 2009 total represents an increase of 81,953 (+ 8%) over 2008, when the total was 982,832 in 176 countries and economies. On the other hand...

Many tools and concepts in the field of Industrial Ecology are developed in this context, e.g., Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), streamlined LCA, Design for Environment (DfE), ecological footprint, factor x, environmental space as well as the environmental management systems ISO 14001, EMAS and BS 7750 (Vellinga et al. (1997) give a good overview of different tools). These methods do not necessaril...