Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee

Corporate environmentalism : antecedents and influence of industry type

How does a business firm manage its relationship with the natural environment? What are the factors that influence the choice of such strategies? Does industry type matter? The authors introduce and operationalize the concept of corporate environmentalism in an effort to answer these questions. Using stakeholder theory, the authors identify four important antecedents to corporate environmentalism, namely, public concern, regulatory forces, competitive advantage, and top management commitment. The authors then use a political–economic framework to develop testable hypotheses. To test the hypotheses, the authors perform multigroup path analysis on data gathered from more than 240 firms. They find that corporate environmentalism is related to all hypothesized antecedents and that industry type moderates several of those relationships. In the high environmental impact sector, public concern has the greatest impact on corporate environmentalism, followed by regulatory forces. In the moderate environmental impact sector, competitive advantage has the greatest impact on corporate environmentalism, followed by regulatory forces. There are strong direct and mediating influences from top management commitment, which is the antecedent with the greatest impact on both industry groups. The influences of regulatory forces, public concern, and competitive advantage are all significantly mediated by top management commitment and moderated by industry type. The empirical findings and the ensuing discussion will be of interest to managers and public policy officials.

Who Sustains Whose Development? Sustainable Development and the Reinvention of Nature

This paper explores the contradictions inherent in one of the more popular buzzwords of today: sustainable development. I argue that, despite claims of a paradigm shift, the sustainable development paradigm is based on an economic, not ecological, rationality. Discourses of sustainable development embody a view of nature specified by modern economic thought. One consequence of this discourse involves the transformation of ‘nature’ into ‘environment’, a transformation that has important implications for notions of how development should proceed. The ‘rational’ management of resources is integral to the Western economy and its imposition on developing countries is problematic. I discuss the implications of this ‘regime of truth’ for the Third World with particular reference to biotechnology, biodiversity and intellectual property rights. I argue that these aspects of sustainable development threaten to colonize spaces and sites in the Third World, spaces that now need to be made ‘efficient’ because of the capitalization of nature.

Corporate environmentalism : the construct and its measurement

Abstract This paper examines managerial perceptions of corporate environmentalism — the process by which firms integrate environmental concerns into their decision making. Based on a review of the literature, the paper defines the concept of corporate environmentalism. Two themes of corporate environmentalism are discussed — corporate environmental orientation and environmental strategy focus. Scales to measure these themes are then developed and their psychometric properties tested in a mail survey of managers in 311 firms.

Managerial perceptions of corporate environmentalism: interpretations from industry and strategic implications for organizations

Environmental issues are becoming increasingly important in organization theory and practice. Corporate environmentalism is emerging as a process of addressing environmental issues facing business firms. In this paper I examine managerial perceptions of corporate environmentalism and describes how key organizational members interpret the relationship between their firm and the biophysical environment. Corporate environmental orientation and environmental strategy focus are two themes of corporate environmentalism that emerge from the study. I discuss managerial perceptions of regulatory forces, public environmental concern, top management commitment and need for competitive advantage, and how perceptions of these factors might translate into environmental strategies. I conclude by discussing implications of corporate environmentalism for organizational theory and practice.

Shades of Green: A Multidimensional Analysis of Environmental Advertising

Abstract Environmental appeals are becoming increasingly common in advertising, but all green ads are not created equal. The authors report the results of a content analysis designed to uncover the underlying structure of green advertising. A convenience sample of 95 green TV ads and 173 green print ads were content-analyzed. Multidimensional analysis indicates that the structure of green advertising can be captured in three dimensions: sponsor type (for-profit or nonprofit), ad focus (whether the ad focuses on the advertiser or the consumer), and depth of ad (shallow, moderate, or deep depending on the extent of environmental information mentioned). A majority of advertisers in the sample attempted to project a green corporate image rather than focusing on the environmental benefits of their product or service.

Whose Land Is It Anyway? National Interest, Indigenous Stakeholders, and Colonial Discourses The Case of the Jabiluka Uranium Mine

In this article, the author examines the case of the highly controversial Jabiluka uranium mine that was recently given the green signal by the Australian government. The mine, to be constructed in the heart of the Kakadu National Park (home to the Mirrar people and a World Heritage site) has been the topic of public debate and controversy involving Aboriginal communities, political parties, the mining industry, and environmentalists. By examining the colonial and anticolonial discourses that inform the mining project (with a particular focus on the colonialist, capitalist discourse inherent in the construction of Australian nationhood and the management of Aboriginal identity), the author argues that contemporary postcolonial theory can be problematic. It tends not to account for anticolonialist struggles or the struggles of the colonized to negotiate with and survive colonial conditions. The author also examines the differential power dynamics among stakeholders in this process and concludes by discussing implications of this case for stakeholder theory and for critical management studies.

Corporate environmental strategies and actions

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.

Climate Change and the Emergence of New Organizational Landscapes

There is general agreement across the world that human-made climate change is a serious global problem, although there are still some sceptics who challenge this view. Research in organization studies on the topic is relatively new. Much of this research, however, is instrumental and managerialist in its focus on ‘win-win’ opportunities for business or its treatment of climate change as just another corporate social responsibility (CSR) exercise. In this paper, we suggest that climate change is not just an environmental problem requiring technical and managerial solutions; it is a political issue where a variety of organizations – state agencies, firms, industry associations, NGOs and multilateral organizations – engage in contestation as well as collaboration over the issue. We discuss the strategic, institutional and political economy dimensions of climate change and develop a socioeconomic regimes approach as a synthesis of these different theoretical perspectives. Given the urgency of the problem and the need for a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, there is a pressing need for organization scholars to develop a better understanding of apathy and inertia in the face of the current crisis and to identify paths toward transformative change. The seven papers in this special issue address these areas of research and examine strategies, discourses, identities and practices in relation to climate change at multiple levels.

Masking Subversion: Neocolonial Embeddedness in Anthropological Accounts of Indigenous Management

Sustainability and sound ecological management of the natural environment, allied to the expanding body of work on managing tacit and explicit knowledge, has led to an increased interest in the contribution which anthropology can make to the practical adaptation of indigenous environmental knowledge and practice to the improvement of organization in western societies. In an exemplary ethnographic study of an indigenous beaver trapper belonging to the Cree Nation, Whiteman and Cooper introduced the concept of ecological embeddedness. Their study could be considered a model that reverses the traditional practice of viewing managers as though they were primitives and applying concepts employed in studying native communities to organizations. They consider indigenous practitioners as managers, identify their management practices, and then reconsider contemporary management practice towards the environment in this light. They argue that to be ecologically embedded as a manager is to identify personally with the land, to adhere to beliefs of ecological respect, reciprocity and caretaking, actively to gather ecological information and to be located physically in the ecosystem. The present article provides a critique of Whiteman and Cooper’s argument and explores the ways in which, at the same time as it is purportedly represented, indigenous thought is masked and thereby subverted. We argue that much of their theorizing - as in so much anthropological accounting - is rooted in neocolonial thought and despite the authors’ claims, a so-called ‘indigenous land ethic’ has limited, if any, relevance to current management theory and practice. This is because such a land ethic is disembedded from the indigenous consciousness of their own economic, social and political history; and similarly for its reception requires a similar disembeddedness in the receiving culture - which then applies a loose analogy or even caricature of indigenous behaviour to its own practices. Such a consciousness remains, therefore, unreflexively embedded in its own neocolonialism. We argue that these problems are not confined to Whiteman and Cooper’s work, but are, to a greater or lesser degree, found in a wide range of anthropological accounts and constitute a problem with which the field is still struggling. To import these features into organizational theorizing without recognizing the deeply problematic nature of contemporary anthropological practice can only produce a reductionist and romanticized picture of native ontologies.

Voices of the Governed: towards a theory of the translocal

In this article I want to interrogate the political, economic, and social conditions that enable the extraction of natural and mineral resources from Indigenous and rural communities in Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. The end of direct colonialism and the emergence of the development state did not necessarily translate into forms of local sovereignty for these communities who bore the brunt of development. I describe the emergence of resource wars in the postcolonial era and how organizational technologies of extraction, exclusion and expulsion lead to dispossession and death. I conclude by discussing possibilities of resistance and develop the notion of translocal resistance where local actors most affected by development are able to forge a series of temporary coalitions with international and national groups in an attempt to promote some form of participatory democracy. The article advance debates on postcolonialism by developing theoretical insights from translocal modes of resistance that open up new analytical spaces marked by particular configurations of market, state and civil society actors.