The adoption and outcomes of ISO 14001 across Korean business firms

Abstract

Environmental sociologists and organizational scholars have recently been interested in the origins of voluntary environmental programs and their various outcomes. Similarly, this dissertation examines the adoption of ISO 14001 known as the most famous voluntary environmental program and its consequence in the Korean context. More specifically, I situate the motivation to adopt ISO 14001 and its various outcomes in the context of two theoretical frameworks: resource-based view and institutional theory. I begin by using event-history modeling to examine firms' adoption of ISO 14001 in Korea between 1996 and 2011. I find that both resource-based and institutional factors have influenced the diffusion of ISO 14001. By exploring time-related effects, I also find that while resource-based factors are important in the early periods of the diffusion, institutional factors become important in the later periods of the diffusion. I then explore the effects of ISO 14001 on pollutant emissions among facilities in Korea from 2004 to 2011. Using data from the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) program of Korea, I find that the adoption of ISO 14001 does not affect the changes of emission performance from 2004 to 2011. This finding indicates that ISO 14001 has been adopted as a symbol to show off organizational commitment to societal requests for environmental responsibility, but not as an instrument to become greener. Moreover, this finding suggests that the institutional context favorable to the diffusion of ISO 14001--in particular, the Korean government's active involvement in the diffusion of ISO 1400--is not likely to lead to the improvement in environmental quality. I conclude the dissertation with a discussion of what these two studies tell us about corporate social responsibility in Korea and, broadly, East Asia.