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RESEARCH PRODUCT

(Un)Routinization of the Environmental Performance Measures – A Case Study; BSC Rules but Does not Routinize

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This study focuses on the (un)routinization of environmental performance measures (EPMs). It studies how new environmental measures were implemented within the new environmental management system (EMS) and how they became connected with the financial measures, like cost savings and profitability. By doing so, they were connected to the taken-for-granted profit orientation of the case company in order to overcome these values and to make them succeed in organization. Later on these new measures were also included in the new BSC. In conditions of the profit oriented taken-for-granted values, the BSC locked the rule status of the environmental measures, but it locked them at the operational level, while they were not included in the more strategic level scorecard. Neither the profit connection nor the BSC were able to make the environmental activities to be enacted as the routine organizational action. The ‘power of the system’, the institutionalized profit and cost orientation was too much for the environmental agenda to overcome. We found also several sub stages in ‘rules’ or ‘routinization’. EMS rule, BSC rule, routinization of environmental reporting and finally, routinization of environmental action. The routinization of reporting preceded the routinization of action because the routinization of reporting was much easier than the routinization of environmental action. Therefore, future studies could consider two different processes of routinization in more detail by building on the framework of Burns and Scapens (2000).