Organizations have shown different behavior patterns in terms of the aspects concerning environmental management, even when they follow a certified system of environmental management according to NBR ISO 14.001. Such differences are present at the level of procedures, applied resources, control instruments and impacts related to other activities in the company. This work aims at the proposal of a taxonomy for the environmental management of industrial organizations, with a formal system of environmental management, and also the analysis of this environmental management with the adopted product and process technologies. A research was conducted in 37 industrial organizations in Brazil, and the quantitative analysis of the data used the factorial analysis technique, the Kruskal-wallis statistical test, and the cluster analysis. The results of this study allowed the improvement of the model of classification of companies in terms of environmental politics proposed by Hunt and Auster (1990). Six factors were identified for the analysis of the variable environmental management, characterized as control, prevention (formalization, growth, prevention and prevention chain) and proactivity. As for the companies, the cluster analysis allowed the identification of the three groups of companies: control, prevention and proactivity, which assigned more emphasis respectively to the control, prevention and proactivity factors, in increasing order of emphasis. These groups also showed various behavior patterns in terms of technological innovations of process, and origin of the adopted technologies.
environmental management; technology innovation; NBR ISO 14001
