Organizations To Adopt The Iso 14001 Environmental Management System, The Driving Force Of Research And Suggestions

Since was issued in 1996, Environmental management system (EMS) ISO14001 has received attention and response widely all over the world. The number of ISO14001 certified organizations swiftly increasing, the accumulative total number has arrived at 74,004 by October 2004. In the context of this, as China economy is increasingly going into the process of globalization, especially after joining in WTO, the number of ISO14001 certified organizations in China has also risen fastly. Since ISO14001 was introduced to China in 1996, the total number of ISO14001 certified firms and other organizations has reached 8,862 by the late of 2004, which listed the top 3 through the world. As basic compoents of society, organizations naturally become the undertaker of the goal of sustainable development, and should make individual efforts to realize it. However, every organization is "economic man" in the society, which often pursues to maximize its own interest withal neglecting the interest of the whole society. Voluntary adopting ISO14001 has positive externality. EMS ISO14001 is non-compellent, and the process of adoption is so rigid and complexy which will add to the cost of the organization. Why do organizations voluntarily adopt it? What are the drivers? How different is the drivers of different organizations? Understanding the true incentives of voluntary adoption (VA) is very important for framers of environmental policy, because the validity of government environmenal policy lies on how organizations respond to it.In the recent years, researches on the drivers of VA in the west have gained some great achievement. However, because of often emphasizing some aspects or factors but ignoring others, and having not formed some accepted integrated frameworkes, the interpretion of these studys to AV is still very limited. Moreover, these studys were almost all made in the context of the developed countries in the west. Researches in the developing countries run short, especially in China.On the basis of summarizing and evaluating existing studys on VA, this paper founds a model of organization's vuluntary adopting ISO14001 and some hypotheses, then testifies these by questionnaire survey and SPSS, and at the last puts forward some advices for government to establish environmental policy based on the tested model.