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To address the critical sustainability challenges currently faced by China, manufacturers in this country have committed to improve their environmental performance. To support this commitment, evidence suggests that Chinese manufacturers have mainly turned to the implementation of environmental management approaches such as ISO 14001, cleaner production, green supply chain management, circular economy and green lean. However, the adoption of other approaches such as total quality environmental management (TQEM) by Chinese manufacturers is less clear. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by providing light into fundamental issues regarding the implementation of TQEM in the manufacturing sector of China.

A survey-based exploratory study was conducted based on 119 Chinese manufacturing companies, and the data obtained were analysed using a combination of descriptive and inferential statistics.

The results revealed that in general, there is less awareness of TQEM in the Chinese manufacturing sector than other environmental and quality/operations improvement approaches such as green supply chain management, reverse logistics, ISO 9000, Six Sigma and lean Six Sigma. Thus, its degree of implementation is also lower than these approaches as well as ISO 14001. The results also indicate that although a company’s size is not associated with the implementation of TQEM, it is mainly large organisations and those that have adopted TQM those which will be mainly aware and have implemented TQEM. The study also reveals the drivers, results and challenges of TQEM implementation.

The paper extends the currently limited knowledge on TQEM, and its results are beneficial for managers who aim at effectively adopting TQEM to simultaneously improve the environmental, operational and financial performance of their organisations. The paper can also motivate organisations not currently embarked on the “green wagon” to contemplate the benefits that implementing TQEM, or any other environmental management approach, may bring to their operations and business.

Calls attention to an expanded focus for total quality management(TQM) which includes the environmental impact of manufacturing. Just as the concept of TQM forced a change in the economic paradigms of quality, provides empirical evidence that firms seeking a more globalized level of customer satisfaction, one which includes both cost competitiveness and environmentally sound products and processes, have overcome the traditional economic assumption that being environmentally sound reduces productivity. Provides an exploratory discussion which integrates environmental legislation, public concerns and consumer requirements with traditional operations management (OM) thinking in order to support the view of the potential role of TQM in developing synergies between operational performance and environmental excellence.

The integration of environmental responsibility in the organisational structure of companies means granting an increasing relevance to this area. They have a manager in charge of the area or a department dedicated exclusively to it, which should redound to the achievement of increasingly higher effectiveness of the environmental programs. The objective of this paper is to judge the level of development of environmental management systems and their relation to the importance companies attach to the environmental area in their organisational chart. We show that as companies advance in their environmental behaviour they attach more importance to this area in their organisational structure.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework integrating the Hart and Milstein (2003) strategies for organizational sustainable development (SD) with the ideas of Kleindorfer et al. (2005) on sustainable operations management (SOM), which requires guidance of green supply chain management (GSCM).

The construction of the framework was based on previous studies that discussed synergies between operations management principles with environmental bias and studies on adoption of GSCM practices.

The proposed framework guides managers to reconcile operations management practices/principles that are already being implemented in organizations with an environmental perspective because these practices sustain organizations to simultaneously reach SOM and SD.

The paper presents a framework that provides guidance on how organizations can seek sustainability in their operations, considering that articles on the topic of sustainability have not been developed with this specific focus.

This paper studies the relevance of the “greening of production” in the South‐East Asian context. It investigates the various initiatives taken by the companies of this region and thereby identifies the factors that are critical in the process of greening production in this region. The significance of the factors are ascertained and validated through an empirical research that has been conducted across five countries of the region employing the structural equation‐modeling framework.

Organizations can develop and implement a range of strategies to address environmental issues. A wide range of actions can result from these strategies. Describes the environmental strategies of over 250 US firms. In particular, examines company participation in 25 environmental activities and discusses industry differences in environmental activity. Also discusses the range of environmental strategies and managerial perceptions of environmental issues. Concludes with a discussion on policy implications and directions for future research.

Total quality management (TQM) was developed at the same time as the interest in environmental issues began to emerge and, as such, it has built in the same concepts as those regarding issues relevant to the environment. Suggests the acronym in use today, TQEM (total quality environmental management), clearly reflects its genesis and the existing parallelism between quality and environmental problems. In the vision of a TQM‐oriented company in which, by striving for continuous improvement, quality is deployed to everybody, the analogy with the environmental programme is demonstrated by the fact that it is not necessary to convince anyone of the need to operate in a “greener” manner because each person is already convinced of his/her own role in this domain both as an individual and as an employee of the company.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of Industrial Management & Data Systems is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Industrial Management; Industrial Engineering and Work Study; Industrial Design; Quality Management; Manufacturing Strategy and Production; Information Systems.

For western companies pursuing, or considering pursuing competitive strategy through Keiretsus recent indications from Japan of problems between Keiretsu partners will provide food for thought.

While there exists a growing literature on corporate “green” strategies, there is a research gap about which corporate architectures and organizational change processes enable “green” strategies. This article addresses the research gap in an interdisciplinary manner by focusing on two questions: What conditions characterize ecological and humanly sustainable corporations? What alternative architectures can generate and institutionalize corporate sustainability? Three alternative architectures for sustainability are treated and three research propositions are identified to further future empirical research on specific architectures that link organization design and corporate sustainability.