Environmental Management Systems As A Source of Competitive Advantage

Abstract

AbstractThe resource-based view of the firm is an emerging framework that includes bundles ofresources, barriers, and isolating mechanisms that help a firm’s competitive position to be stableand defensible. This existing theory can provide insight into environmental management policyand specifically Environmental Management Systems (EMS) as a source of competitiveadvantage.To date, little attention has been devoted to addressing the implications of EMS as acontributing factor to firm competitive advantage. Contrary to an often-expressed view,environmental management systems may do more than just add to the costs of operations.Environmental Management Systems are a corporate paradox. They can be major contributingfactors to the isolating mechanisms that firms use for protection against new entrants and toenhance profits. However, many managers see such systems as costs , not opportunities. Theresult is that they invest only enough to meet regulatory requirementsThis paper explores the events leading up to the development of EMS and how EMS canbring about a competitive advantage. Moreover, it attempts to resolve the paradox by developinga theory-based framework. This framework shows that the benefits of an EMS are the result ofendogenous and exogenous factors that impact a firm’s awareness of these strategic benefits.The framework is used to generate research propositions and questions to be tested later .Keywords : Environmental Issues; Environmental Management Systems ; Competitive Advantage

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.