Motives, Barriers, and Expected Benefits of ISO 14001 in the Agri-Food Sector

Rocio Carrillo-Labella, Fatiha Fort and Manuel Parras-Rosa
Additional contact information
Rocio Carrillo-Labella: Department of Business Organization, Marketing and Sociology, University of Jaen, 23071 Jaén, Spain
Manuel Parras-Rosa: Department of Business Organization, Marketing and Sociology, University of Jaen, 23071 Jaén, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 5, 1-17

Abstract: Over time, sustainability has gained a greater presence in companies and with consumers around the world, although it can be said that there is still some confusion in its conceptualization and in the identification of the driving factors. A part of the literature considers that environmental management systems (EMS) such as ISO 14001 are facilitating factors that allow organizational remodeling towards more sustainable production. For a better understanding, this paper presents a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews to analyze the perceptions that managers, employees, and quality managers have about the concept of sustainability and, given that environmental management systems are considered as motivational factors, it also analyzes the perceptions they have about the motivations, barriers, and expected benefits of their adoption in the olive food industry in southern Spain. It is possible to point out the existence of some confusion about the concept of sustainability, and that both regulatory and market factors such as image and reputation improvement, differentiation, and sales increases, especially in exports, are considered to be motivational for their implementation. This work contributes to the literature on sustainability and environmental management systems in sectors of activity with high environmental involvement, such as the agri-food industry.

Keywords: sustainability; environmental management systems; ISO 14001; agri-food sector; olive oil sector (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/1724/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/1724/ (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Motives, barriers and expected benefits of ISO 14001 in the agri-food sector (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:5:p:1724-:d:325059

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().