Organization and Environment

According to one perspective, organizations will only be sustainable if the dominant neoclassical model of the firm is transformed, rather than supplemented, by social and environmental priorities. This article seeks to develop a “sustainability business model” (SBM)—a model where sustainability concepts shape the driving force of the firm and its decision making. The SBM is drawn from two case studies of organizations considered to be leaders in operationalizing sustainability and is informed by the ecological modernization perspective of sustainability. The analysis reveals that organizations adopting a SBM must develop internal structural and cultural capabilities to achieve firm-level sustainability and collaborate with key stakeholders to achieve sustainability for the system that an organization is part of.

This essay examines links, similarities, and dissimilarities between stakeholder theory and sustainability management. Based on the analysis a conceptual framework is developed to increase the applicability and the application of stakeholder theory in sustainability management. Concluding from the analysis, we identify three challenges of managing stakeholder relationships for sustainability: strengthening the particular sustainability interests of stakeholders, creating mutual sustainability interests based on these particular interest, and empowering stakeholders to act as intermediaries for nature and sustainable development. To address these challenges three interrelated mechanisms are suggested: education, regulation, and sustainability-based value creation for stakeholders.

Impact and benefit agreements (IBAs) between natural resource developers and Aboriginal communities are increasingly portrayed as viable approaches to assure Aboriginal people will reap economic benefits of resource extraction in their traditional territories. Drawing from existing literature about the social context of IBA negotiations, especially in Northern Canada, the authors’ analysis contributes to the study of negotiated agreements by using Lukes’s three dimensions of power to examine how IBAs confer particular advantages and disadvantages to Aboriginal people and proponents of development, thereby distributing power inequitably. The authors argue that, under some conditions, IBAs may provide more direct engagement with industry and a sharing of benefits from resource development than heretofore has been provided in Northern Canada. Depending on the before-, during- and after processes and outcomes, IBAs can also stifle Aboriginal people from sharing information about benefits negotiated by other groups, prevent deeper understanding of long-term social impacts of development, thwart subsequent objections to the development and its impacts, and reduce visioning about the type and pace of development that is desirable.

This article seeks to shed light on the diversity of scaling strategies of social enterprises, which can be considered as emblematic hybrid organizations. By comparing three Flemish renewable energy cooperatives with contrasted scaling strategies, the article shows how these strategies can be understood in relation to the organizational mission as imprinted at the founding. We extend the notion of hybridity beyond the combination of institutional logics to highlight the interest orientation (mutual vs. general interest). Unlike what is suggested in extant literature, we find that mutual interest orientation may be associated with “scale-up,” business growth strategies, while general interest orientation may lead to less growth-focused “scale-out” and “scale-deep” strategies. The findings illuminate aspects of the hybrid nature of social enterprises by explaining their diverse scaling strategies and extend the notion of imprinting to the interorganizational level by highlighting how social enterprises may collaborate to collectively achieve the pursuit of their multiple missions.

This article develops a theoretical foundation for understanding the human influence on the oceans and the resulting oceanic crisis as it relates to the depletion of fish stock and the expansion of aquaculture. Drawing on environmental sociology and insights from the historical materialist tradition, the authors study the nature-society dialectic as it relates to human interactions with the ocean for the capture of fish. We extend Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift to the marine environment to (a) understand the human transformations of the ocean ecosystem, (b) examine the anthropogenic (human-generated) causes of fish stock depletion, (c) study the development of aquaculture in response to the oceanic crisis, and (d) reveal the ecological consequences of ongoing capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment.

This study compares the environmental hazard burden experienced by Blacks, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Whites in each of the 329 metropolitan areas in the continental United States, using toxicity-weighted air pollutant concentration data drawn from the Environmental Protection Agency's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project to determine whether and to what degree environmental inequality exists in each of these metropolitan areas. After demonstrating that environmental inequality outcomes vary widely across metropolitan areas and that each group in the analysis experiences a high pollution disadvantage in multiple metropolitan areas and a medium pollution disadvantage in many metropolitan areas, the authors test three hypotheses that make predictions about the role that residential segregation and racial income inequality play in producing environmental inequality. Using logistic regression models to test these hypotheses, the authors find that residential segregation and racial income inequality are relatively poor predictors of environmental inequality outcomes, that residential segregation can increase and decrease racial/ethnic group proximity to environmental hazards, and that the roles income inequality and residential segregation play in producing environmental inequality vary from one racial/ethnic group to another.

This review article summarizes the main tenets of institutional theory as they apply to the topic of the Anthropocene in the domain of organization and the natural environment. But our review is distinctive for two reasons: First, it is focused on providing avenues researching the Anthropocene Era. Second, while based on the trajectory of current, accumulated theory and research, our review is forward-looking in its orientation and thus aimed at guiding future work to explore the emergence of a new social reality in Anthropocene Society. We begin by summarizing the scientific research on the Anthropocene Era, then move to its implications for grand and midrange institutional theory principles, and of institutional principles for the study of it. We end with a call to reenergize and reradicalize the organization and the natural environment field to properly address the magnitude and scope of this shift to the Anthropocene.

This article sets forth a new theoretical model that holds that local, regional, and global environmental crises are to a significant degree the product of organizational, institutional, and network-based inequality, which provide economic, political, military, and ideological elites with the means to create and control organizational and network-based mechanisms through which they (a) monopolize decision-making power; (b) shift environmental and nonenvironmental costs onto others; (c) shape individuals’ knowledge, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior; and (d) frame what is and is not considered to be good for the environment. These undemocratic mechanisms produce severe environmental harm because they provide elites with the means to achieve goals that are often environmentally destructive and because they are sometimes environmentally destructive in and of themselves, as is the case with military power. After situating their study in the broader literature, the authors describe their theoretical model in detail and present three case studies that identify some of the most important mechanisms through which elites exert power and harm the environment.

The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have created a framework for environmental and social impacts, which institutional investors and corporations are using to guide resource allocation or highlight SDG-aligned investments already in place. We argue that the SDGs have clarified certain elements predominantly missing or implicit in many environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, specifically focusing on companies’ E and S externalities. Methodologically, we analyze how health care companies contribute to SDG 3 on health and well-being as a case, mapping the goal’s targets to the Sustainability Accounting Standard Board’s (SASB’s) 30 generic ESG issues and considering both financially material and immaterial ESG issues, based on SASB. Using an innovative data set, we highlight where private sector firms contribute to SDG impacts and where their financial priorities might lie. Where firms are either not contributing or perhaps unable to, we point to the need for public sector activities.