Frances Bowen

Horses for Courses: Explaining the Gap Between the Theory and Practice of Green Supply

Researchers and policy-makers have become increasingly enthusiastic about greening purchasing and supply management activities. In theory, greening supply should both limit environmental damage from industrial activities, and deliver bottom line benefits to implementing firms. However, compared with other environmental initiatives, few firms have implemented extensive green supply programmes.

Environmental visibility: a trigger of green organizational response?

This paper develops a typology of visibility in an environmental context. Although visibility has been neglected and ill defined in contemporary environmental management research, environmental visibility can be a useful construct for predicting green organizational response. As such, it might prove a useful tool for environmental management researchers, policy-makers and business strategists. The paper derives a conceptual typology of visibility from previous organizational theory research. Visibility is considered both as a characteristic of an organization and as a characteristic of an issue, and at both the corporate and operating unit levels. Data collected in a recent series of interviews in 24 business units in UK PLCs are analysed to provide examples of the types of visibility in an environmental context. The resultant environmental visibility typology is used to discuss the relationship between environmental visibility and green organizational responses. This studys findings suggest that considering environmental visibility as a predictor of green organizational response should be fruitful for future empirical research, and useful for policy-makers and business strategists. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment.

The role of risk in environment‐related supplier initiatives

This paper extends previous literature on the greening of supply chains by giving explicit consideration to two main areas – the role of risk, and the motives for undertaking different sorts of environment‐related supplier initiatives. A model is presented which describes the extent and type of environment‐related supplier initiatives that may be undertaken by firms as a result of the interaction of the perceived losses to the firm associated with inaction, and the actual level of strategic purchasing in the firm.

Does Size Matter? Organizational Slack and Visibility as Alternative Explanations for Environmental Responsiveness

Does size matter in explaining firms’ environmental responsiveness? Are large corporations more likely to engage with green issues for fear of losing stakeholder support? Are bigger companies greener because they have more resources to devote to environmental problems? Environmental management researchers routinely include company size in empirical studies of environmental responsiveness, but with mixed empirical results. This thesis argues that explaining the ambiguous relationship between organization size and environmental responsiveness depends on disaggregation. Researchers should examine alternative explanations for the size-responsiveness relationship, different levels of analysis, and distinct types of environmental responsiveness. As organizations have increasingly engaged with environmental issues throughout the 1990s, researchers have generated more and more empirical studies on the predictors of environmental responsiveness. Firms are environmentally responsive to different degrees because of, among others, institutional pressures, internal organizational attributes such as organizational structure or capabilities, managerial characteristics, or costbenefit considerations.

Storm Clouds and Silver Linings: Responding to Disruptive Innovations Through Cognitive Resilience

Incumbent firms facing disruptive business model innovations must decide whether to respond through inaction, resistance, adoption, or resilience. We focus on resilient responses to simultaneous perceived threat and opportunity by managers of small incumbent firms. Using cognitive framing arguments, we argue that risk experience moderates perceptions of opportunity, whereas perceived urgency moderates situation threat. We test our framework in the real estate brokerage context, where small incumbents face considerable challenges from disruptive business model innovations, such as discount brokers. Analysis of data from 126 real estate brokers broadly confirms our framework. We conclude with implications of our research for small business incumbents.

Organizational Slack and Corporate Greening: Broadening the Debate

Organizational slack seems to have an ambiguous relationship with corporate greening. On the one hand, excess resources can be used to experiment with new environmental innovations, or potential green market segments. On the other, excess resources can be used to build corporate buffers against pressures for environmental improvement, such as large corporate environmental departments or environmental lobbying activity, and resist changes to the core of the organization. This paper begins to resolve these conflicting arguments by broadening the debate on organizational slack and corporate greening. It builds on recent empirical studies of slack and corporate greening, and recognizes the many potential roles that different types of slack may play in a dynamic decision-making context. Using a theoretical framework suggested by Bourgeois (1981), the paper systematizes and draws lessons from examples of the roles of slack encountered in a recent series of 35 interviews within UK public limited companies. It concludes that future treatments of slack and environmental management should incorporate a more holistic view of slack, which recognizes its dynamic, complex and often contradictory effects on decision-making in organizations.

Climate Change: Challenging Business, Transforming Politics

Climate change challenges contemporary management practices and ways of organizing. While aspects of this challenge have been long recognized, many pertinent dimensions are less effectively articulated. Based on contemporary literature and insights from articles submitted to this special issue, the guest editors of this special issue highlight some of the challenges posed by climate change to government and business, and indicate the range of options and approaches being adopted to address these challenges.

Carbon accounting: Negotiating accuracy, consistency and certainty across organisational fields

Purpose - A fully functioning carbon accounting system must be based on measurement that is materially accurate, consistent over space and time, and incorporates data uncertainty. However, achieving these goals is difficult because current carbon accounting efforts are spread across three distinct organisational fields, each prioritising different goals. This paper aims to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach - The authors identified three fields drawn together by the science of how carbon emissions can be measured, the social practices of carbon accounting, and accountability within the global carbon governance system. The authors hosted a workshop, and invited representatives participating in each of the organisational fields to highlight the contentious conversations within their field. The authors facilitated an across-field exploration of whether and how to achieve accuracy, consistency and certainty in carbon accounting. Findings - It was found that there are tensions between accuracy, consistency and certainty in carbon accounting both within and across organisational fields. Framing the evolution of carbon accounting as negotiation between these goals across fields yields powerful implications for addressing current challenges in carbon accounting. Practical implications - The authors provide guidance to policymakers on how to recognise legitimate uncertainty in carbon management science, manage the cost-benefits of policy and reporting mechanisms, and ensure actual greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Originality/value - This paper exploits the unusual approach of integrating carbon accounting across levels of analysis, from the molecular level through processes, organisations, industries and nations. This approach should help scientific, corporate and policy decision-makers move towards a more fully functioning carbon accounting system.

Greenwashing in Corporate Environmentalism Research and Practice: The Importance of What We Say and Do

Barely a month goes by without another high-profile firm being accused of misleading communications about environmental activities or performance. Already in 2014, Nestle has been called to account for promoting its customized recycling program for Nespresso disposable coffee pods, which has only a negligible overall waste reduction impact. Unilever has been subjected to a Twitter campaign alleging that its partnership with The Guardian newspaper to host a sustainable living online engagement platform did not accurately reflect the firm’s true environmental impacts. The frequency of similar problems, the high profile of the organizations involved, and the potentially damaging implications for the credibility of managers and researchers of organizations and natural environment motivated us to devote this collaborative editorial to the research frontiers and implications of corporate greenwashing, illustrating some of our ideas with the articles in this issue. Greenwashing is the selective disclosure of positive information without full disclosure of negative information so as to create an overly positive corporate image (Lyon & Maxwell, 2011). Greenwashing is a central empirical phenomenon within organizations’ interactions with the natural environment because it is hard for stakeholders to directly evaluate firms’ environmental performance. This leads to a reliance on firms to signal their environmental quality through environmental reports, advertising, corporate websites, or eco-certification schemes. Increased environmental disclosure without obvious substantive improvements in environmental impacts has fed justifiable skepticism about the gap between what firms say and do on environmental issues (e.g., Dauvergne & Lister 2010; Forbes & Jermier, 2012; Konefal, 2013). Increased environmental disclosure has also provided research questions and empirical data for scholars to analyze greenwashing behavior, its drivers, and its consequences (e.g., Delmas & Burbano, 2011; Du, 2014; Walker & Wan, 2012). In her book After Greenwashing: Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism and Society, Frances Bowen (2014) argues that the less sophisticated forms of greenwashing may be declining due to a combination of increased stakeholder vigilance and the flattening of information symmetries through new data and monitoring technologies, while the broader symbolic dimensions of corporate environmentalism are becoming even more pervasive. Activists have launched inventive ways to expose greenwash, such as posting and rating examples of greenwash (see www.greenwashingindex.com) or categorizing it into different types of “corporate sins” (TerraChoice,

Taking Stock, Looking Ahead Editors’ Introduction to the Inaugural Organization & Environment Review Issue

In summer 2015, the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its first formal conference program back in 1995. Over the past two decades, a vibrant and engaged scholarly community has generated thousands of empirical and conceptual studies on the complex relationships between organizations and their natural and social environments. Each individual study focuses on specific research questions crafted to meet the rigorous requirements of academic journals. However, too often our journal publishing and professional norms push us to focus on small, incremental contributions to knowledge. Anniversaries can remind us to pause, take stock, and build on the past to shape a new future. The Organization & Environment (O&E) editorial board decided to provide a venue for this anniversary celebration: a special issue where as a community of scholars we can reflect on where we have been, what we have learned, and what remains to be understood to both further our field and help society address pressing environmental challenges. In this first review issue of O&E, we hoped to draw insight and inspiration from in-depth reviews of specific topics. Our call for articles invited authors to reflect on the state of theory, empirical research, and practice in relation to key questions at the interface of organizations and the natural environment. We sought out comprehensive and analytical reviews of recent research that synthesized, integrated, and extended our thinking. We encouraged authors to anchor their thoughts in detailed retrospection on past and current research, and to identify the key theoretical, empirical, methodological, or practical challenges of future O&E research. There was an enthusiastic response from the community of scholars and in the end, we have assembled a group of six articles.1 Each offers a stand-alone review of a particular phenomenon within the O&E domain. Together they showcase the wide range of scholarship addressing topics ranging from the macro to the micro foundations of our field. Beginning at the macro end of the spectrum, Hoffman and Jennings (2015) alert us to the challenges of our own making as they introduce the concept of the Anthropocene to our scholarly conversation. By asking us to contemplate the implications of the permanent and unprecedented stratospheric and geologic impacts that we as humans are having on our planet, they connect the