Organizational changes and EMS adoption: the case of the French agro-food firms
Résumé
It is now widely accepted in the literature that industrial firms have undergone through major transformations in the past decades. In the agro-food sector, the tendency has been to favour the adoption of food safety, quality control, just-in-time and traceability practices in order to reduce delivery times and respond to regulations, customers and sudden variations in demand. At the same time, there has been a growing concern about sustainability and the environment (Porter and van der Linde, 1995, Rennings, 2000, Horbach, 2008). In this matter, the adoption of an Environmental Management Systems (EMS) can be considered a new management tool, both for coordination and organizational change issues. The aim of this paper is to study the determinants of EMS adoption among agro-food firms. Beyond the general determinants of EMS adoption (Grolleau et al., 2007), the objective is first to show the organizational factors explaining the adoption of EMS. Second, we intend to explore the relationships and complementarities that can be found between EMS and organizational dynamics for a greening management.