ISO 14001: a case of cultural myopia

Under pressure from governments, public opinion and customers, organizations are setting more challenging environmental agendas. To deliver on these agendas managers and staff must refashion business strategies and production processes. In this context, ISO 14001 has been welcomed for appearing to detail the managerial and work arrangements that will enable corporations to exercise effective control over the implementation of environmental policies. The putative benefits of these arrangements include the identification of the obstacles blocking policy implementation – especially organizational barriers, the specification of realistic and monitorable goals and the means to align policies and programmes with those goals. In fact, far from enabling organizations to pursue what for them are groundbreaking environmental strategies, the management principles and systems detailed in ISO 14001 compound matters. The organization culture projected by these principles encourages risk avoidance, places a premium on tradition and precedent and discourages originality and creativity. ISO 14001 should be revised to incorporate participatory and more flexible systems of management: research suggests that such systems are more likely to trigger the required conceptual dynamic.