An integrated typology of green manufacturing profiles

Abstract

This article proposes a typology to classify the Environmental Operations Strategies that the European Companies develop in order to adapt themselves to the requests of their green stakeholders. First, main research lines in Environmental Operations Management are analyzed; second, a typology based on the coherency of different variables that have been considered separately by other authors is presented and validated for a sample of 3051 European manufacturing companies. The results show that European manufacturers have not achieved yet similar levels of integration of the environmental concern into all managerial functions with the aim of reaching a sustainable balance between economic and ecological performance of the firm. Consequently, conventional typologies looking at different environmental criteria in a piecemeal fashion seem to be no longer valid for explanatory and/or decision making purposes.