Environmental assessment of organising: towards a framework for the study of organisational influence on environmental performance

The paper discusses a new perspective on industry's environmental performance and presents the concept and field of environmental assessment of organising. EAO builds on the notion that different ways of managing industrial production lead to different environmental performance. To understand how industrial organising influences environmental performance it is necessary to take ordinary physical flow modelling of technical systems, such as life cycle assessment, a step further by embedding these in an organisational context. Such an understanding could provide new knowledge for environmentally "smarter" management. The concept of EAO aims towards a theoretical framework that bridges environmental management, organisational theory and environmental systems analysis. Its presentation here is grounded in a literature review on works related to industrial environmental performance. Two studies testing the practical application of EAO are briefly presented and discussed. These have contributed to the presented basic methodology and rudimentary research programme for EAO studies.