The Impact of International Management Standards on Academic Research

Knut Blind,Anna Pohle,Dmitry Neustroev

doi:10.3390/su10124656

Abstract

Management standards serve as an effective knowledge diffusion channel, considering that they offer comprehensive scientific and practical knowledge for many different stakeholders. This research aims to study the potential of management standards to diffuse knowledge, especially within the scientific community. Therefore, it analyzes the relationship between management standards and the academic literature. It focuses on international management standards, namely ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 and their ‘European counterparts’ EMAS and the EFQM Excellence model. We tested whether scientific publications, which address these international and European management standards, are more likely to lead to follow-up research than comparable scientific publications measured by the impact on average forward citations. Hence, we applied a negative binominal regression model on bibliometric data. Findings show that publications addressing ISO 14001 alone or in combination with other standards lead to higher average forward citations than the comparison group. In conclusion, international management standards foster the academic research progress of the topics addressed by the respective standard. Our research implies the importance of monitoring standards for the scientific community and suggests Standard Setting Organizations to foster actively the research progress.

Highlights

Standards are beneficial for different reasons: they facilitate the market access, support the diffusion of technologies [1], enhance the flexibility of management [2], and they can foster different forms of innovation [3]
We developed a set of keywords to identify ‘articles’, ‘articles in press’ and ‘reviews’ from 1985 to 2017, which deal with at least one of the standards International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), ISO 9001, and European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM)
This section portrays the basic picture of the data set and offers a first glance how management standards diffuse within the academic literature

Summary

Introduction

Standards are beneficial for different reasons: they facilitate the market access, support the diffusion of technologies [1], enhance the flexibility of management [2], and they can foster different forms of innovation [3]. They serve as a technology transfer channel considering the knowledge entering the standards [5,6]. They enable the development of innovative technologies, which build upon standards [7]. Our analyzes include two standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), namely ISO 9001 (quality management system) and the ISO 14001 (environmental management system). A European counterpart for ISO 9001 is provided by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), they introduced the EFQM Excellence Model (EEM) [28].

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion