The Impacts of Corporate Environmental Management Systems

The authors present and discuss the results of empirical research on the implementation of standardised environmental management systems in companies. As there are basically two competing standards – the European Eco-management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and the worldwide ISO 14001 – the focus of the paper is on potential different and common features of the corporate implementation, experiences and impacts. Although the methodical approaches of the empirical research projects differ to a great extent, their results are quite similar: the experiences of companies with environmental management systems do not really differ with respect to the formal standards underlying them but to the cor-porate culture and the strategic importance environmental orientation has for the company. There are some more or less important differences in the formal demands of the two standards (e. g. the duty to publish an environmental report within EMAS but not within ISO 14001), but these differences do not really lead to different corporate practices. The widespread opinion-especially in Austria and Germany- that EMAS leads to ‘star performance ’ in environmental management cannot be confirmed by empirical findings. In addition to these results this paper points out the occurring problems of empirical research in