No abstract

While a growing body of literature has examined and demonstrated the influence of eco-control on organizational performance, little is known about how this influence occurs within the organization. Building on a natural resource-based view, the aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the eco-control package supports environmental capabilities that, in turn, contribute to an organization's environmental and economic performance. Using survey data from a sample of Canadian manufacturing firms, the results of this study suggest that eco-control may constitute a mechanism that can support environmental capabilities in order to contribute to a firm's environmental and economic performance. More specifically, these results suggest that the eco-control package fosters eco-learning, continuous environmental innovation, stakeholder integration, and shared environmental vision capabilities that can, in turn, contribute both directly to the firm's environmental performance and indirectly to economic performance. Also, some evidence suggests that different eco-control practices support different environmental capabilities and that the simultaneous use of several eco-control practices seems to be necessary to support the implementation of a complete set of environmental capabilities.

The aim of this exploratory study is to examine the importance of measurement and use of environmental performance indicators (EPIs) within manufacturing firms. Two research questions are investigated: (i) To what extent are firm characteristics associated with the importance of measurement of various categories of EPIs? (ii) To what extent are firm characteristics associated with global and specific uses of EPIs? More specifically, this paper examines four uses of EPIs (i.e. to monitor compliance, to motivate continuous improvement, to support decision making, and to provide data for external reporting) as well as four characteristics of firms, namely environmental strategy, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001 compliance, size, and ownership. This study contributes to the environmental management accounting literature by collecting and analyzing empirical evidence that provides a better understanding of the associations among firm characteristics and EPIs.

a b s t r a c tAn emerging stream of literature has investigated the link between management controls and the environmental strategy. However, this literature has provided an incomplete picture of that link, notably because of the lack of distinction between the intended and realized strategy and the lack of attention devoted to multiple environmental strategic intentions. The purpose of this study is twofold: (i) to examine the ability of eco-control to support competitive environmental strategies by translating strategic intentions into ecopractices, (ii) to examine the extent to which the role of eco-controls, when translating environmental strategic intentions into eco-practices, varies when strategic intent is predominately based on eco-efficiency or eco-branding. Using survey-data from a sample of 249 manufacturing firms, the results suggest that the predominance of either ecoefficiency or eco-branding intent leads to variations in the use of beliefs, boundaries, diagnostic and interactive levers of eco-control. More specifically, the results suggest that firms focusing predominately on eco-efficiency intent rely on the levers of eco-control to convert their strategic intentions into eco-production practices to a greater extent than organizations focusing predominately on eco-branding intent to implement eco-marketing practices. Also, the results suggest that, while the adoption of the levers of eco-control framework seems to be driven by eco-efficiency intentions, organizations may act on cost reduction before using eco-controls to implement eco-marketing practices when increasing revenues.