Mapping the Relationships of Environmental Management Controls – A literature based review of empirical evidence

Description

Although there exists a long tradition on analysing management control systems (MCS) in the literature, the link to environmental or sustainability-related issues still remains fragmented, especially concerning the interaction between environmental management controls (EMC) and the causal relationships of EMC, contingencies and outcomes like corporate environmental or financial performance and resource efficiency. In this paper, we conduct an integrative literature review of 35 empirical studies related to environmental management control systems (EMCS) in order to identify relevant hypotheses between EMC, contingency factors and outcomes. By synthesising and structuring the hypotheses according to the framework of Malmi and Brown (2008), we provide a compact overview of tested and significant relationships illustrated as maps. In order to provide additional value and suggestions for future empirical studies, we relate the hypotheses from the specific angle of resource efficiency. The main contribution of the paper is the in-depth examination of relationships between EMC, which enables a better understanding of the complexity of EMCS in relation to environmental issues, like resource efficiency. In addition, the findings reveal that the most common EMC addressed are administrative, cybernetic, and planning management controls and that there are still various relationships that have not been examined up to date and that could be subject to further studies.

Period	10 Mar 2016
Event title	13th Annual Conference for Management Accounting Research (ACMAR)
Event type	Conference
Location	GermanyShow on map