Corporate Environmental Management for the Textile Sector: Towards an Empirical Typology

Purpose - Environmental sustainability is gaining more and more relevance in many industries. In order to embark on a strong effort to decrease the environmental impacts, companies must build a comprehensive environmental management system within the organisation. Although studies on this issue have progressively increased in the extant literature, still little investigation has been carried out on the alignment of the corporate environmental management dimensions: strategy, practices and competitiveness. With the objective to focus the analysis in order to derive targeted and specific practical implication, this article brings forth an integrated corporate environmental management approach for the textile sector. Design/methodology/approach - A three-step research process was conducted. Firstly, a reference model for corporate environmental management in terms of strategy, practices, competitiveness and profitability was built from literature. Then, the conceptual model was used to develop an online survey on the state of corporate environmental management in textile companies. A cluster analysis was carried out to analyse the collected data. Findings - A cluster analysis enabled to distinguish between three significantly different types of environmental strategies: Committed, Prone and Subjected to environmental sustainability. These three strategic types were then characterised in terms of practices, competitiveness and profitability and their internal coherence was discussed. Practical implications – The authors suggested three evolutionary trajectories to create a stronger alignment within the corporate environmental management approaches of the three clusters, intended as future directions to build a sustainable textile supply chain. A discussion of the supporting management tools that could be used by textile companies in their evolutionary journeys is then provided. Originality/value - This paper extends existing sustainability models building an integrated corporate environmental management framework that encompasses “environmental strategy”, “environmental management practices” and “environment-driven competitiveness and profitability”.