| Different Smokes for Different Folks: a Comparative Study of Paint Shop Waste Management in the United States and Canada |
| | Rothenberg, Sandra | Rochester Institute of Technology | Sandra_Rothenberg@ksg.harvard.edu | 617-496-0808 |
| | Transnational corporations are faced with regulations and enforcement practices that vary across countries. One issue of concern is the degree to which plants take standardized or differentiated approaches to environmental management. Building upon institutional theory, this paper compares environmental management practices in two sister plants that operate in different regulatory contexts. I argue that environmental management decisions are a reaction to not only multiple institutional pressures, but technical pressures as well. Environmental staff members, acting as boundary spanners, negotiate these various pressures. This process of negotiation involves both taken for granted responses (as postulated in institutional theory), as well as more purposeful action. The choices made by environmental managers will vary according to the strength of institutional pressures, and the degree to which potential responses to these pressures conflict with technical pressures. Understanding this process of negotiation can help explain when plants operating in different regulatory contexts are more likely to take a standardized approach to environmental performance and management. Specifically, one is more likely to see plants take a more standardized approach to environmental management when environmental improvements do not conflict with technical pressures. |
| | Keywords: environmental regulation; institutional theory; environmental management |
| Coercion Breeds Variation: The Differential Impact of Isomorphic Pressures on Environmental Strategies |
| | Milstein, Mark B. | U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | milsteim@icarus.bschool.unc.edu | (919)-962-9687 |
| | Hart, Stuart L. | U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | harts@icarus.bscool.unc.edu | (919)-962-8405 |
| | Ilinitch, Anne Y. | U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | ilinitch@gibbs.oit.unc.edu | (919) 962-3141 |
| | Institutional theory postulates that three institutional pressures-coercive, mimetic, and normative-cause firms to become more homogenous over time. Previous studies of environmental strategies relying on institutional theory have echoed these assumptions as institutional pressures have been credited with causing a convergence of firm commitments to environmental management and sustainable development. Furthermore, these studies have suggested that coercive pressures exert a stronger isomorphic influence than the other two. Data analysis of a subset of the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 in the IRRC's 1992 Company Environmental Profiles Directory, however, reveal that institutional pressures may not always behave as previously assumed. In contrast to received theory, firms in an industry with high coercive pressures revealed more variation in environmental strategies than did firms in an industry with lower coercive pressures implying that strategy may play a more important role than institutionalism indicates. This suggests that mimetic and normative pressures have been driving institutional theory while coercive pressures may, in fact, be responsible for differentiation among firms. In this paper, we examine the type and significance of observed homogeneity and heterogeneity attributable to the different institutional pressures and develop propositions concerning the relationship between environmental strategies and financial performance as moderated by institutional pressures. |
| | Keywords: Institutional Theory; Environmental Strategy; Coercion |
| The Political Ecology of Organisations: Framing Business-Environment Relationships |
| | Orssatto, Renato J. | U. of Technology, Sydney (UTS) | renato.orssatto@uts.edu.au | (612)-9514-3600 |
| | A central debate in business-environment studies has developed recently around the achievement of double dividends or win-win situations. A double dividend is achieved when resource productivity and economic competitiveness are both enhanced. The paper addresses the economic and managerial limits of this approach, one that is strongly allied to Michael Porter's work. It does so by questioning the nature of resource productivity and regulation - the two central variables of the double dividend approach - through incorporating an institutional-power perspective into the debate. The paper's central argument is that political factors play a decisive role in determining the willingness of companies to develop environmental strategies and consequently to search for win-win situations, and that the double-dividend perspective does not model these theoretically. The paper proposes to study ecological practices as a contingent, contested and indeterminate terrain of political and strategic actions, located both within and around organisations - a political ecology of organisations. The theory derives from the circuits of power framework, and it is applied to the industrial sector that is both most emblematic of modern times and of the polluting consequences of modernity: the auto industry. Selected cases are drawn from the Western European context of automobile manufacturing, use, and end-of-life strategies to analyse the general path that the industry is following and to suggest directions for future research. |
| | Keywords: Double Dividends, ; Institutional-Power, ; Automobile Industry. |