Management and the environment in the UK and Germany: A comparison

Environmental performance will be an increasingly important factor in determining the competitive success of companies in the new Europe as we move towards the next century. The demands of the environmental or green challenge will require changes to both the hardware and software organisations, as they attempt to respond to an ever-tightening web of environmental legislation and to the needs of a new generation of more environmentally aware consumers, investors and employees. This article explores the organisational dimensions of the response to the green challenge among German and British companies, who are often presented as representing the opposite poles in the spectrum of green responses. The results reveal a surprisingly strong wave of enthusiasm for 'greening' among British companies reflected in a wide variety of organisational changes. If these are complemented by substantial improvements in the 'hard' dimensions of products and technologies, they could place British companies in an unex- pectedly promising competitive position within the emerging green markets of Europe.