Corporate Environmental Compliance Research Articles

Data modeling and NLP-based scoring method to assess the relevance of environmental regulatory announcements

The constantly growing body of global environmental legislation necessitates that corporate environmental compliance managers frequently assess the relevance of new regulations and regulation revisions for each of their sites. Companies are pressured to streamline and automate this crucial task through digital workflows and specialized IT-based assistance systems. This has recently piqued the interest of researchers working in different disciplines, such as intelligent systems, machine learning, and natural language processing. The article describes the latest results of our long-term research program on IT-based support for corporate compliance management, offering insights for these, and other disciplines. The context and the main aspects of environmental regulation announcements and the relevance assessment task are analyzed. An extensive conceptual data model is developed that serves as a foundation for tailoring a generic method to perform a relevance assessment that considers site-specific individual environmental compliance facts. The method uses heuristic data operations and various text processing techniques from the field of natural language understanding. In order to exemplify the method, two application scenarios are described in which the relevance of new waste management directives are assessed for a multi-site production company.

Corporate Environmental Compliance in China: From Social Responsibility to Soft Law

The environmental compliance of Chinese corporations is promoted in two main dimensions. On the one hand, based on external pressure from the legal system surrounding national environmental protection, corporations need to adjust their production and operations to comply with environmental law requirements. On the other hand, environmental compliance is based on the consensus of the whole society in regards to environmental protection. The members of corporations, due to their awakening to the idea of environmental protection, independently achieve the goal of environmental protection through ecological operation. The latter is mainly developed from the perspective of corporate social responsibility. However, environmental protection compliance based on corporate social responsibility faces problems, such as conflicts between multiple values, the misalignment of compliance subjects, and the lack of binding force. In fact, the perception, participation, and implementation of environmental protections by employees, communities, and other stakeholders has a significant impact on corporate environmental compliance. Soft law can bring together corporate employees and other stakeholders for the ethical consensus on environmental protection and achieve the purpose of environmental compliance.

Systems theory-based abstractions and decision schemes for corporate environmental compliance management

Even though corporate sustainability management has become a major topic of research and of the business world, its digitalization is still in an infancy stage. One of the reasons for this situation is the fact that domain-specific abstractions, which are a major underpinning of digitalization in general, have so far received very little attention. This is particularly a major obstacle for the digitalization of the work area of corporate environmental compliance management (CECM), which is intended to ensure that the firm complies with environmental legislation. Using general system theory, the CECM area is analyzed, and a set of domain-specific abstractions is proposed. Further contributions of the article are focused on two crucial CECM decision tasks: the relevance assessment of environmental regulations and the determination of compliance enforcement measures. Based on the abstractions, decision schemes and tailored domain-specific templates of decision trees for these tasks are suggested and demonstrated through a running example. It is expected that through these novel building blocks, this research contributes to an advancement of the digitalization of CECM processes and of sustainability management in general. For example, the proposed building blocks may serve as a foundation for the development of compliance management information systems that offer smart assistance for CECM tasks. Digital assistance may mitigate deficiencies in CECM expertise and CECM experience, which are often imposed in practice by tight budget constraints.

Disclosure of Environmental Compliance Management on Corporate Websites

Environmental disclosure in business has been researched. However, only a few projects have addressed disclosures in connection to the companies' obligations to follow environmental laws, standards, and regulations which is the main objective of the field of corporate environmental compliance management (CECM). This article describes the basis of a systematic literature review and the current state of knowledge about CECM website disclosure. Furthermore, major conceptual and methodological aspects for future disclosure studies are presented. The authors also propose a global CECM data collection and further research directions in order to close today's knowledge gap concerning determining factors and major characteristics of CECM disclosure. The research directions are exemplified by a set of novel questions. Future investigations of these questions through corresponding data analysis on the basis of the proposed CECM data collection will yield new insights that are relevant for researchers, practitioners, and governmental agencies.

Environmental policy regulation and corporate compliance in evolutionary game models with well-mixed and structured populations

We use an evolutionary game model to study the interplay between corporate environmental compliance and enforcement promoted by the policy maker in a country facing a pollution trap, i.e., a scenario in which the vast majority of firms do not internalize their pollution negative externality and auditors do not inspect firms. The game conflict is due to the trade-off in which firms are better-off when they pollute and are not inspected, while social welfare is maximized when auditors do not need to inspect socially responsible corporations that account for pollution in their production decisions regarding technology used and emission level. Starting with a well-mixed two-population game model, there is no long-run equilibrium and the shares of polluters and shirking auditors keep oscillating over time. In contrast, when firms and auditors are allocated in a spatial network, the game displays a rich dynamics depending on the inspecting cost. While the oscillatory behaviour is still possible, there is a set of parameters for which a long run robust equilibrium is achieved with the country leaving the pollution trap. On the other hand, an excessively high inspection cost leads to an ineffective auditing process that drives the few compliant firms out of the country.

Supporting Environmental Compliance Managers by Ticket Systems - An Industry Survey, Deployment Options and a Reference Business Process

Corporate environmental compliance managers are required to perform and supervise a set of complex tasks. It can be expected that the growing density of environmental regulations will contribute to even more challenges for compliance managers in the near future. As a result, companies are increasingly pressured to improve the efficiency of their compliance management processes by the use of automation approaches. For some specific compliance management processes it is expected that a partial process automation can be obtained through the use of a ticket system. However, so far only little is known about the general usage options and benefits of ticket systems for environmental compliance management. Given this gap, the article contains a corresponding demonstration and evaluation study. A reference process model for environmental compliance management and an industry survey of the top software capabilities desired by compliance managers serves as foundation for this study. The process automation options based on a ticket system are exemplified through a reference process for the new regulation management process. The process specification is given in the popular standardized graphical notation called “Business Process Model and Notation” (BPMN).

An integrated theory of corporate environmental compliance and overcompliance

Prior research on corporate environmental behavior has produced myriad factors that explain offending and overcompliance, yet the literature lacks cohesion and would benefit from disentangling corporate- and individual-level explanations. In this study, a cross-level integrated theory of corporate environmental behavior uses Gunningham et al’s. (2003) license framework and Paternoster and Simpson’s (1993; 1996) rational choice theory of corporate crime to portray how individuals within corporations decide to offend or to overcomply with environmental regulations while accounting for the organizational context. Specifically, external pressures (legal, social, and economic) on the corporation, plus internal corporate policies and culture, affect individual-level cost-benefit analyses. In turn, these cost-benefit calculations impact the behavioral decisions made by corporate managers. Four sets of hypotheses based on this integration are tested using an environmental vignette survey of individuals. The results provide mixed support for the integrated theory. It is also noted that predictors of environmental offending are different from those predicting overcompliance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Rules versus Discretion in Corporate Environmental Compliance

By integrating the resource based and resource dependence literature, this research examines the role of managerial support, regulatory ties, and firm visibility in shaping two complementary styles...

Benchmarking corporate environmental compliance performance: A practical approach

Benchmarking corporate environmental compliance performance: A practical approach

USING INTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL AUDITING PROGRAMS TO HELP PREVENT SPILL INCIDENTS

ABSTRACT Texaco, Inc. has been performing environmental audits since 1980. Early audits focused on such major facilities as refineries and chemical plants, which often include waterfront transfer facilities. Prior to the Exxon Valdez accident, Texaco realized the importance of a strong internal environmental auditing program. Groundwork was laid and, in the summer of 1989, a full-fledged corporate environmental compliance auditing program was in place. Audits are now performed, on a cyclical basis, of all Texaco-owned and/or -operated facilities worldwide. Texaco's environmental auditing procedures are based on an Environmental Auditing Protocol, which includes a document review, describes the audit process, and provides for quality assurance and auditor training. Emphasis is placed on pollution prevention and pollution response, and on how the auditing program can help make the company better prepared both to prevent and to respond to a spill. An important element in this is having a full corporate commitment to the environmental auditing program, from senior level management on down.

New guidelines would dictate corporate fines

New draft guidelines for penalizing organizations and companies convicted of civil environmental crimes could substantially raise fines and require companies to put in place new mechanisms for monitoring and reporting violations. The guidelines were worked out by the US Sentencing Commission's Advisory Working Group on Environmental Offenses. There are several ways in which the draft environmental guidelines differ from the existing general sentencing guidelines. One important difference involves consideration of mitigating factors in determining the amount of a fine. Mitigating factors include such things as a strong record of environmental compliance by a company or whether that company cooperated with the Environmental Protection Agency in correcting the violation. Under the current guidelines, an organization can get a maximum fine reduced up to 95% if enough positive mitigating factors are present. That means a maximum $1 million fine can, under the best of circumstances, be reduced to $50,000. Under the draft guidelines, that $1 million fine could be cut no more than 50% to $500,000. A second major difference concerns corporate environmental compliance programs. The current guidelines contain recommendations on what should be in such plans. The proposed guidelines, on the other hand, seem to require such programs to contain certainmore » elements if a company is to receive credit for trying to comply with the law. These elements include having policies that require employees to report any suspected environmental violations, having line managers routinely review environmental monitoring and auditing reports, and setting up a hotline by which employees can report violations anonymously and without fear of reprisal.« less

Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning

Abstract : If organization theory finds it useful to draw upon some of the ideas that have emerged in cognitive psychology, it will be advantageous to borrow also the terminology used in discussing these ideas. Without working toward a higher level of consistency in terminology than prevails in organization theory today, it will be difficult or impossible to cumulate and assemble into a coherent structure the knowledge we are gaining from individual case studies and experiments. We will be continually reinventing wheels. That is a luxury we cannot afford. The happy band of researchers on organization theory is sufficiently small to be kept fully occupied discovering and verifying the theory just once. (Author) (kr)