Voluntary programs intended to improve corporate environmental practices have proliferated in recent years. Why some businesses choose to participate in such voluntary programs, while others do not, ...remains an open question. Recent work suggests that companies’ environmental practices, including their decisions to participate in voluntary programs, are shaped by a license to operate comprised of social, regulatory, and economic pressures. Although these external factors do matter, by themselves they only partially explain business decision making, since facilities subject to similar external factors often behave differently. In this article, we draw from organizational theory to explain why we would expect a company's license to operate to be ultimately constructed by internal factors, such as managerial incentives, organizational culture, and organizational identity, as these shape both interpretations of the external pressures and organizational responses to them. Using qualitative data from an exploratory study of matched facilities that reached different decisions about participating in a prominent voluntary environmental program, we then report evidence indicative of the role of these internal factors in shaping facilities’ environmental decisions. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that could further develop understanding of how internal organizational characteristics influence environmental management decisions, including those concerning participation in voluntary programs.
Is There Cash in That Trash? Paquin, Raymond L.; Tilleman, Suzanne G.; Howard‐Grenville, Jennifer
Journal of industrial ecology,
04/2014, Volume:
18, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Summary
Past work on industrial symbiosis (IS) includes a wealth of case studies across diverse settings, including industrial estates, economic regions, and IS networks. Though this work provides ...needed insight into factors shaping IS, much of it has been descriptive in nature. Relatively few findings have been subjected to hypothesis development and testing. In this study, we develop and empirically test a number of hypotheses on factors influencing IS exchange development, using a unique national‐level IS data set of 1,322 individual material resource‐based exchanges facilitated through the United Kingdom's National Industrial Symbiosis Programme. Our findings affirm and extend the literature in a number of ways. In particular, we found that a firm's number of identified waste streams decreased the likelihood of initiating an exchange, but increased the likelihood of completing it once initiated. We also found, counter to the literature, that diversity among partnering firms reduced the likelihood of both initiating and completing an IS exchange. Finally, we found that higher economic value exchanges were more likely to be initiated, but less likely to be completed. We discuss implications and conclude with a number of avenues for future research.
The Covid-19 pandemic made important societal issues even more pressing and poignant to organizations. I explore how the pandemic surfaced attention to the vulnerability and resilience of ...organizations and organizing, and reflect on our responsibility as organizational scholars to think and act differently about our work as a result. I consider how we might do this individually and collectively, arriving at suggestions for how to advance organization theory and its relevance to contemporary organizing through: (1) directing our care to multiple issues that need attention; (2) having the courage to step away from familiar modes of inquiry and styles of theorizing to explore these; and (3) using our curiosity to develop nuanced explanations that match the complex, systemic nature of the issues themselves.
We explore how organizational culture shapes an organization’s integration and enactment of an external routine that is not a cultural fit. Attending to employees’ use of culture as a repertoire of ...strategies of action, we found that the use of familiar cultural strategies of action shaped the routine’s artifacts and expectations even before it was performed, a process we call
cultural molding
. Subsequently, employees drew differently on cultural strategies of action as they performed the routine, generating patterns of workarounds or hindered performances. In response to these patterns, they undertook additional cultural work to either shield their workarounds and protect them from scrutiny or shore up hindered performances. We contribute to the routine dynamics literature by highlighting the effortful cultural work involved in integrating coveted routines, furthering our understanding of routines as truces and the embeddedness of routines.
Within just a few weeks earlier this year, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive shift to remote work that may change the office as we know it forever. Many large companies are urging employees ...to work from home for months to come, and some CFOs are making plans to shed office real estate and permanently move some portion of their workforces to remote working. Here, Howard-Grenville discusses how to sustain the organization's culture when everyone is remote.
This book fills a critical gap as a textbook and reference book on the comprehensive environmental impacts of industrial organizations. It is intended for both upper-level undergraduate and beginning ...graduate students in environmental studies or engineering, and, more broadly, for practicing managers and engineers seeking to improve industrial processes. Nineteen chapters, each focusing on an industrial sector, from resource extraction through fabrication and manufacturing to recycling, evaluate the sector's inherent "potential to pollute" by providing an overview of typical sector operations and their environmental implications. Beyond outlining and providing frameworks for assessing industrial facilities' contemporary interactions with the environment (energy and water use, material throughput and hazard, and pollution potential), the book provides forward-looking analyses concerning how new technologies and practices can transform environmentally degrading effects of industry. It also addresses how managers can navigate these changes and move their industrial organizations towards environmental sustainability over the long term. The pedagogical approach emphasizes facility visits and subsequent reports that make use of the book's analytical tools.
Topics in the book include the following: -Key topics in greening the industrial facility -Regulatory compliance -Pollution prevention -Life-cycle assessment of products, processes, and facilities -Sustainability assessments -Industrial sector analysis (19 sector-specific chapters from Agriculture to Textiles) -The future of industry and environmental issues.
Drawing on real-time video, an audio journal, interviews, and field notes from the first-ever attempt to scull the navigable Amazon, we explore the promise of carnal sociology to enrich our ...understanding of embodied organizational sensemaking. We investigate the body's role in sensemaking from two vantage points: "of the body" and "from the body." Using methodological and conceptual anchors provided in carnal sociology, we contrast what each approach tells us about the nature and process of sensemaking. Doing so helps us outline a complementary approach to embodied sensemaking that attends to (1) how a "new way of seeing" the body as sentient, sedimented, situated, and capable of suffering enables a more holistic understanding of the role of embodiment in sensemaking; (2) the importance this then places on the "who" of sensemaking; and (3) carnal sociology's broader methodological implications for organizational sensemaking.
Is There Cash in That Trash? Paquin, Raymond L.; Tilleman, Suzanne G.; Howard-Grenville, Jennifer
Journal of industrial ecology,
04/2014, Volume:
18, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Summary
Past work on industrial symbiosis (IS) includes a wealth of case studies across diverse settings, including industrial estates, economic regions, and IS networks. Though this work provides ...needed insight into factors shaping IS, much of it has been descriptive in nature. Relatively few findings have been subjected to hypothesis development and testing. In this study, we develop and empirically test a number of hypotheses on factors influencing IS exchange development, using a unique national‐level IS data set of 1,322 individual material resource‐based exchanges facilitated through the United Kingdom's National Industrial Symbiosis Programme. Our findings affirm and extend the literature in a number of ways. In particular, we found that a firm's number of identified waste streams decreased the likelihood of initiating an exchange, but increased the likelihood of completing it once initiated. We also found, counter to the literature, that diversity among partnering firms reduced the likelihood of both initiating and completing an IS exchange. Finally, we found that higher economic value exchanges were more likely to be initiated, but less likely to be completed. We discuss implications and conclude with a number of avenues for future research.
Climate Change and Management Howard-Grenville, Jennifer; Buckle, Simon J.; Hoskins, Brian J. ...
Academy of Management journal,
06/2014, Volume:
57, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Liminality as Cultural Process for Cultural Change Howard-Grenville, Jennifer; Golden-Biddle, Karen; Irwin, Jennifer ...
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
03/2011, Volume:
22, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper offers a revised understanding of intentional cultural change. In contrast to prevailing accounts, we suggest that such change can take place in the absence of initiating jolts, may be ...infused in everyday organizational life, and led by insiders who need not hold hierarchical power. Drawing on data from field studies and in-depth interviews, we develop a model of cultural change in which everyday occurrences such as meetings or workshops are constructed symbolically as "liminal" phenomena, bracketed from yet connected to everyday action in the organization. The construction of these occurrences as liminal illuminates the symbolic realm, creating possibilities for people to experiment with new cultural resources and invite different interpretations that hold potential for altering the cultural order. Our analyses contribute to the literature on culture by developing liminality, a process that brings forward the symbolic and invites recombination, as a cultural explanation of cultural change, to complement prevailing political or social structural explanations. We discuss implications and boundary conditions for this type of intentional cultural change.
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