The impact of voluntary environmental protection instruments on company environmental performance

In the last decade there has been increasing emphasis on the use of voluntary environmental protection tools such as corporate environmental reporting (CER) and environmental management systems (EMSs). There has been relatively little research, however, on the impact of these tools on the actual environmental performance of companies. This paper presents the findings of a survey of 40 companies operating in Western Australia to determine the extent to which the implementation of two voluntary instruments has influenced company environmental performance. The research considered four questions: To what extent have CER and EMSs influenced the environmental performance of companies operating in Western Australia? What are the characteristics of these influences? How does the influence of EMSs on environmental performance compare to that of CER? Have other external factors concurrently influenced environmental performance? In general, most respondents indicated that EMSs had influenced environmental management practices to some extent. On the other hand, CER was seen more as a public relations exercise and had less impact on company practices compared with EMSs. Other factors that influenced environmental performance included pressure from clients, senior management, the public and regulators; corporate culture; and cost savings. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

How sustainable is participatory watershed development in India?

Watershed conservation is widely recognized as a major strategy for rural development throughout the developing world. In India, the apparent success of participatory approaches to watershed development resulted in a decentralization of project planning, implementation, and management to local communities at the village scale. We explore the effectiveness of this so‐called community‐based approach in achieving sustainable soil and water conservation in four semi‐arid regions in India, and analyze what factors explain project success. We confirm the result of earlier studies that participatory approaches are more effective in establishing soil and water conservation in the short run. However, our main result is that investments in community organization fail to ensure household commitment to maintenance in the longer term. Without better returns to investment in soil and water conservation and without local institutions to coordinate investment in the long run, the sustainability of participatory watershed management is seriously threatened.     

Understanding Group Life:

A bstract From the wide-ranging body of material included in the introductory course in Sociology a list of 10 major understanding is nominated which contributed to the comprehension of group-individual relationships Drawn from over 40 years of teaching Sociology courses at all levels in several university settings, the suggested list is advanced as a challenge to others for additions and deletions in an attempt to filter out the significant from the peripheral, the sinews from the adornments statistical manipulation of data and attempts at esoteric theorizing , valid as they may be may obscure the " liberal arts " contributions (philosophy, history and the arts) which for the vast majority of Basic Sociology students, are the important residue     

The Issue-Analysis Approach to Community Power: A Case Study of Realtors in Kalamazoo*

Abstract Utilizing primarily the issue-analysis method and incidentally the reputational method an assessment is made of certain aspects of social power in a midwestern community. Although a housing proposal had the support of almost every organization in the community, voters rejected it because the real estate board was the key influential in the decision-making process. Respondents clearly saw a self-interest motivation on the part of the realtors but nonetheless identified with them. Neither republicans nor Democrats voted in accordance with the recommendations of their organizations, church members rejected the advice of religious groups, and union members did not follows the urging of the unions. The validity of the reputational method of determining social power is questioned since respondents generally did not identify the real estate board as an influential group in determining community decisions.     

Stakeholders expectations of an environmental management system: some exploratory research

This paper emanates from a larger research project (see Kamp-Roelands and Bouma, 1998) which has a practical focus. This research project seeks to start the process of exploring how environmental management information systems could be designed such that they better satisfy the needs of those using the information which emerges from these systems. In order to develop this work it was necessary to first generate some information about the internal and external stakeholder needs with respect to environmental information. This task has been tackled in the context of a single site of a multinational company. For this site a range of stakeholders were identified and questioned in some detail about, inter alia, their expectations of what an environmental management system (hereafter EMS) could achieve, their motives for using environmental information, how important they viewed various pieces of information to be and their views on quality of information issues. This paper presents the data gathered from this part of the larger project and seeks to determine if there are particular aspects which should be taken into account in EMS design and whether or not internal and external stakeholders are different from each other in their expectations about EMSs. Finally, some tentative concluding remarks are made on the implications of this work for the further investigation of the EMSs.     

Percentiles and approximations of the sample median over the sample range for samples of size 3, 5, 7 and 9 from a standard normal distribution

A table of the distribution function of the quotient of sample median and sample range of small samples from the normal distribution is given which is based partly on theoretical results published by L. de H aan and J. T h . R unnenburg , partly on numerical results obtained with Monte Carlo methods. Moreover an approximation of this distribution by Students distributions is introduced.     

Schattingen en Subjectieve Interpretaties bij de Winstbepaling

De schrijvers betuigen hun dank aan Drs. A. Bosman, Drs. W. F. Duisenberg en Drs. H. Willems voor hun suggesties tot verbetering van een vroegere versie van dit artikel.     

Testing and applying a theory of utility: An attempt to decompose income in compensatory and scarcity rents

Data on income after tax, schooling completed, job held, age, and ‘level of satisfaction’ of 2663 members of the Dutch Consumer Union have been used to estimate regression equations of two types. Type I may be called a specification of a utility function, Type II an ‘earnings function’ (where income after tax was used as earnings). For both types a number of alternatives were estimated both with regard to mathematical shape and with regard to variables included. Defining equitable or justified income differences as differences which do not change the level of satisfaction, a formula for equitable incomes for given combinations of job, schooling and age can be derived from Type I equations. All regression coefficients are found to be lower than the corresponding earnings function coefficients. The latter can then be decomposed into a ‘compensatory’ component and a ‘scarcity rent’ component.