Impact of the Environmental Management System Standardization on the Managerial Image of Firms: An Empirical Study

We describe a characterization of the conceptual and emotional changes on environmental issues in a sample of firms certified under the ISO 14001 standard. Business communications regarding the main Spanish industrial firms have been downloaded from the ABI/INFORM database and processed using Vantage Point software, in order to study the evolution of the main concepts and emotions before and after the certification year. Our study concludes that in the years before certification, environmental management was fundamentally tied to operative issues, broadly pivoting on the immediate impact of a firm's productive activities. Environmental management gains strategic traction in the years after certification, positioning itself near corporate decision-making concepts and associated with adjectives that denote relevance and positivity. The sentiment analysis points at an increased positivity of environment-related issues, accompanied by a general decrease in negative emotions and an increased presence of expectation and planning emotions.