| A myriad of certified management standards have recently emerged to guide business practices in regards to environmental management. The ISO 14001 standard, the European Eco-Audit Management Scheme (EMAS) and the Chemical Industry's Responsible Care are some of the most widely used standards within the business world. Understanding how these voluntary programs are adopted and what circumstances enhance or hamper their diffusion is still under-researched. Other under-investigated factors are the circumstances under which companies adopting Corporate Environmental Policies (CEPS)---the only public disclosure document required by ISO 14001---will actually implement them or otherwise use CEPS are a 'greenwashing' tool.; In this thesis, I investigate ISO 14001 to explore some missing pieces that will help in grasping a deeper understanding of its diffusion. In the first part, I introduce transaction cost theory into the institutional approach to understand the standard's adoption. I analyze the adoption of ISO 14001 among the North American automotive supplier industry to find that only under those circumstances in which dependence between buyer and supplier is greater, coercive pressures for adoption of the ISO 14001 standard will be effective. In the second part, I investigate the international diffusion of the ISO 14001 standard within the chemical industry. My findings indicate that rather than hampering each other's diffusion processes, the different certified management standards (i.e., ISO 14001, the quality ISO 9000 standard, and the Chemical Industry's Responsible Care program) feed on each other and enhance the diffusion process. In the third part on this thesis, I investigate the adoption and implementation of Corporate Environmental Policies (CEPS) in the manufacturing, chemical, oil and gas, and service sectors. This is done with the purpose of finding that companies do commit to very similar CEPs, but that implementation differs across sectors depending on the pressures and incentives to do so. |
