ISO 14001 certification: literature review and research directions

Environmental sustainability has become a key priority for managers, scholars and policy makers. After about twenty years of research in this field, this paper presents the first literature review on ISO 14001, the most important environmental certification. Six prominent streams of ISO 14001 research, i.e., drivers, barriers/problems/limitations, variables affecting the implementation and diffusion, impact on performances, and variables affecting the results, have been identified, organized into a conceptual framework, and presented. Drawing from these findings, we propose an agenda for future research on this topic.