Abstract
Over the past 30 years, organizations of many different kinds have introduced environmental preoccupations into decision-making, engaging with – and in many cases co-constructing – a striking array of rankings, best practices, standards and other governance tools. However, there has thus far been surprisingly little exploration of the evolving normative implications of environmentalism: existing organizational research treats environmentalism as a static, uniform and quasi-naturalistic phenomenon. In this article, we argue instead that environmentalism is fluid and multifaceted, evolving over time to produce differing conceptualizations that become affiliated with – and mobilized by – particular groups of actors. Using the theoretical framing of path generation, we identify how environmentalism follows a path characterized by episodes of re-conceptualization and re-labelling, a discursive evolution reflecting incremental yet consequential interactions with other institutional paths. We engage in a conceptual history to identify junctures where environmentalism meets with other institutional trajectories, facilitating shifts in meaning. We identify moments of crookedness in the transnational environmental path that are symbolically reflected in label changes – from the emergence of “sustainable development” in the 1980s, to “sustainability” in the 1990s, and more recently, an offshoot towards “resilience”. Those label changes are not only, we propose, symbolic markers but are also performative and entrench consequential regime transformations with regard to environmentalism. Through our exploration, we contribute to theory development while also generating empirical implications: theory-wise, we identify mechanisms of path generation that inform broader debates around path dependence. Empirically, we illustrate how different variants of environmentalism are connected to specific meaning systems, exhibiting affinity with different organizational fields.
Introduction
Over the past two decades, organizations of many different kinds – private firms, universities, public or semi-public agencies, scientific laboratories and even churches – have adopted best practices, frameworks and standards aimed at ascribing value to, preserving and improving the natural environment (Graham, Amos, & Plumptre, 2003; Waddock, 2000; Young, 1994). Whether targeting energy conservation, wildlife preservation, climate change mitigation, disaster prevention or social integration, a diverse array of governance tools are now standard fare in decision-making – e.g., ISO 14001, Fair Trade certification, the Kyoto Protocol, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or Local Agenda 21. Adoption of these tools is now, for many different kinds of organizations, an accepted means of attaining competitive advantage and ensuring legitimacy (Bansal & Clelland, 2004; Bansal & Roth, 2000).
Strikingly, while these tools and associated practices are becoming increasingly well-established, there is still little consensus on the basic meaning and normative implications of environmentalism (Johnston, Everard, Santillo, & Robèrt, 2007). This is apparent in the multiplicity of labels that are currently used to denote environmentalism – “sustainability” is used interchangeably with other terms such as “sustainable development”, “resilience”, “greening” or “ecologism” (Banerjee, 2003; Johnston et al., 2007; Lélé, 1991, 1998). This profusion of terminology not only generates significant conceptual confusion but also prevents a more rigorous assessment of the normative implications associated with environmentalism as a major contemporary institution (Meyer, Frank, Hironaka, Schofer, & Tuma, 1997). Such conceptual confusion, we propose, stems from the misconception that environmentalism is a spontaneous collective reaction to impending ecological challenges (Banerjee, 2003; Wittneben, Okereke, Banerjee, & Levy, 2012). Perceived in this way, environmentalism becomes misrepresented as a homogenous and a-temporal phenomenon.
In this article, we expose environmentalism as a historically constructed and evolving institution. At different stages of this evolution, environmentalism becomes associated with different conceptualizations. We identify phases of framing and reframing, institutionalization and gradual transformation – the result being a “crooked institutional trajectory” (Djelic & Quack, 2005, 2007). In the process, organizational implications become apparent: we demonstrate how different kinds of organizations mobilize, champion and appropriate different conceptualizations and labels. These labels are associated with different ideological assumptions and values; hence they evoke contrasting normative implications in, for example, public agencies or for-profit firms. Rather than merely reflecting the evolving nature of ecological challenges, we show that conceptual and practice heterogeneity around environmentalism is a by-product of struggles within and between organizational domains. The dominance of particular regimes of conceptualizations has normative and practice implications that may steer managerial decision-making and orient resource allocation in quite distinct directions.
We identify three major regimes of conceptualization as reflected in the use of three different labels – “sustainable development”, “sustainability” and “resilience”. Through an exploration, on the timeline of environmentalism, of defining texts and key events associated with the emergence and structuration of each regime, we outline how those terms – while sometimes used interchangeably – are in reality each linked with particular institutional conditions and contextualized meaning systems. As such, they have distinct normative but also practical implications for organizations. We show how those regimes vary in prevalence – both through time and across categories of actors involved. While there is no neat temporal succession from one regime to another, we do show that “sustainability” gains ground through time – without ever fully displacing “sustainable development” – with a more recent upward trend supporting “resilience”. We follow the shifts and turning points that account for and trigger the changing prevalence of each regime and associated meaning systems.
Our tracing of the evolution of environmentalism allows us to specify four mechanisms that produce gradual yet transformative institutional change in the absence of radical rupture, with a particular focus on developments at the transnational level. We thus contribute to theory development and inform more current debates on institutional “path dependence” (Schreyogg & Sydow, 2011; Sine & David, 2003) and “path generation” (Djelic & Quack, 2007). The mechanisms we identify – assimilation, coalescence, co-optation and recombination – point to ongoing work and negotiations among individual actors and organizations to either reinforce or redirect a trajectory. They evoke non-linear, distributed and aggregated agency (e.g., Munir & Phillips, 2005). Although we do not purport to be exhaustive with these four mechanisms, our perspective provides a complementary view to traditional accounts of transformative change based on external shock or to agentic forms of institutional entrepreneurship (Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, 2007; Garud, Kumaraswamy, & Karnøe, 2010; Sydow, Schreyogg, & Koch, 2009), accounts that, in any case, rarely embrace transnational dynamics.
The rest of the article is structured as follows: we begin with an examination of recent discussions in the path dependence and path generation literatures, followed by an overview of our conceptual history methodology. We proceed to explore how the environmental debate developed into a transnational phenomenon starting from the launch of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. From there, we point to consequential inflection points during the 1970s and 1980s along the trajectory of environmentalism, where episodes of partial re-conceptualization result in the emergence of new normative and operational regimes. Such deviations are proposed to be the result of incremental yet consequential interactions with other transnational trajectories, namely those of scientization, managerialization and risk management.
Institutional Trajectories and Mechanisms of Transformation
Path dependence and institutional change
Path dependence proposes that, by virtue of first mover advantage or other favorable starting conditions, certain technological innovations, organizational or institutional practices stabilize over time, eventually “locking in” to an entrenched state (Arthur, 1994; Reinstaller & Holzl, 2009; Vergne & Durand, 2011). The theory provides a particularly strong contribution to understanding the dynamics of stabilization and institutionalization: practices emerge and diffuse, ultimately becoming organizationally and institutionally inscribed (Ebbinghaus, 2009; Hall & Soskice, 2001; Schneiberg, 2006). Taken cumulatively, these phases comprise an “institutional trajectory” (David & Strang, 2006; Djelic & Quack, 2007).
While path dependence scholars offer generally consistent explanations for path stability, the subject of path modification and transformation is more of an open question (Sydow et al., 2009). Early accounts suggest the necessity of external jolts to derail deeply entrenched paths from one “punctuated” equilibrium to another (Gersick, 1991; Haveman & Rao, 1997; Schneiberg, 2005). However, given that exogenous pressures and challenges generally occur on a continuous basis, only a fraction of total trajectory changes can be characterized as “spasmodic, infrequent events” (Martin, 2010). Hence, research has shifted towards evolutionary alternatives that explain how fundamental transformation can occur in a more incremental fashion (Garud et al., 2010; Mahoney & Thelen, 2010; Pierson, 2000). Greater attention is paid to the role of agency, with change being connected to both specific purposes and politics: actors strategically facilitate change through experimentation, conversion and recombination of institutional resources, or leverage embeddedness in multiple fields to transpose practices and logics across boundaries (Bassanini & Dosi, 2001; Crouch & Farrell, 2004; Morrill, 2002). This agentic turn materializes in accounts focusing on dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship or institutional work by individuals or organizations (Garud et al., 2007; Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2010; Munir & Phillips, 2005).
As useful as these agentic perspectives are to explain specific instances of institutional change, they fall short in two ways. Firstly, their resolute focus on individual agency means they are neither equipped to examine the aggregations of episodes that constitute institutional trajectories nor the relationships between such episodes. Secondly, they preclude examination of institutional dynamics produced by distributed agency; many institutional phenomena are the product of individual agentic action that is only cumulatively impactful (Garud & Karnøe, 2003; Munir & Phillips, 2005). Although some progress has been made in this area (e.g., Garud et al., 2007; Garud & Karnøe, 2003; Quack, 2007), much exploration remains to be done on the specific mechanisms of distributed agency that produce and alter institutional trajectories (Lawrence et al., 2010). In response, we consider the notion of path generation as better fitted to the task of theory development with regard to the emergence and structuration of institutional trajectories.
Path Generation and the Crookedness of Institutional Trajectories
The notion of “path generation” suggests that transformative institutional change can develop through incremental and partly disconnected, yet cumulatively significant pressures on an institutional path (Djelic & Quack, 2007). This occurs when two (or more) paths come to coexist and interact over a long period of time – e.g., with voluntary institutional appropriation (Westney, 1987), colonial or military occupation (Djelic, 1998) or periods of imperial and cultural hegemony (Ikenberry & Kupchan, 2009). A multiplicity of pressure points through time generates unintended “crookedness” and open-endedness, not a predetermined, linear trajectory. Thus, while actors have agendas, resources and “purposes”, the processual nature of institutional change in this case implies a highly dispersed and partly disconnected notion of agency. Consequential change occurs through the cumulative impact through time of a multiplicity of agentic moves, though the result is impossible to describe as “purposive action” – the influence of any particular actor on the overall transformation process is generally weak. The result of this aggregation of multiple individual purposes could only be identified and recognized post-hoc. Hence there is an inherent element of unpredictability associated with path generation, as trajectories are susceptible to develop unanticipated properties (Djelic & Quack, 2007).
Thus, path generation research contrasts with extant theories of path dependence, in that it can be applied to investigate complex trajectories of institutionalization and change beyond individual, agentic-based episodes. Nonetheless, we still lack an understanding of the particular mechanisms undergirding these kinds of processes: what are the specific types of interactions that paths have with each other? Such an exploration would not only advance research in the nascent but growing area of path generation, but would also inform broader discussions on the nature of path dependence and institutional change: studies within the latter perspective generally focus on singular trajectories operating in the absence of other trajectories (e.g., David & Strang, 2006; Haveman & Rao, 1997; Munir & Phillips, 2005). An examination of path interactions in domains populated by multiple paths – and a specification of the nature of these interactions and hence of the mechanisms of change and re-orientation – would represent valuable theoretical development for current debates on path dependence, path generation and institutional change.
Using “global environmentalism” (McCormick, 1991) as an exemplar case study of a complex institutional trajectory, we delineate the mechanisms that facilitate the transformation of this path over the course of more than half a century. We begin our exploration in the 1960s, examining the conditions leading to the transnationalization of environmentalism. We proceed to identify how the emergence of related but distinct discourses around “sustainable development”, “sustainability” and “resilience” is emblematic of collisions between environmentalism and other transnational paths. Critically, the nature of discursive change indicates the type of path interaction that occurs, allowing us to outline four specific mechanisms of path consolidation or re-orientation: Assimilation, Coalescence, Co-optation, and Recombination.
Methodology – Conceptual History
To follow the trajectory of environmentalism and highlight changes over time, we use conceptual history as a method (Koselleck, 2002). Conceptual history entails a “historical sociology of concept formation” (Somers, 1995b, p. 115). It reflects an epistemological conviction that language, concepts and their meanings are contextual, situated and socially constructed (Foucault, 1972; Koselleck, 2002; Palonen, 2002). Words and concepts are not mere labels put on the “essence of things”; rather they are historical and cultural objects that reveal and express “symbolic systems with their own histories and logics” (Somers, 1995a, p. 232). These systems co-evolve with particular historical circumstances but are also strongly performative: changing meaning systems will influence discourse but also instruments and practices associated with a particular concept or label; these changes might even lead, in the end, to a transformation of the label. Crucially, new meaning systems are likely to have an impact both on cognitive frames and on patterns of activities.
Conceptual history has been gaining ground in most social sciences over the last two decades (Hampsher-Monk, Timans, & van Vree, 1998; Koselleck, 2002; Palonen, 2002; Skinner, 1969). Scholars in different disciplines have used this methodological program to explore such fundamental categories and concepts as “agency” and “order” (Alexander, 1982), the “person” (Carrithers, Collins, & Lukes, 1985), “civil society” (Somers, 1995a), “sovereignty” (Bartelson, 1995), “poverty” (Dean, 1992), or “moral hazard” and “limited liability” (Djelic & Bothello, 2013). As a methodological program, conceptual history belongs to the “reflexive” turn in social science (Woolgar, 1988) – which calls for “turning social science back on itself to examine the often taken-for-granted conceptual tools (and fundamental categories) of research” (Somers, 1995b, p. 114).
In concrete terms, our data collection and analysis consisted of three phases. First, we compiled terms considered as synonymous with environmentalism, using the Princeton WordNet lexical database. This database groups nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs into “synsets”, cognitive clusters of terms that can be used interchangeably in discourse. We charted the frequency of usage of the 15 terms constituting the environmentalism synset – including “environmentalism” itself – over a 30 year period (1985–2014), using the Factíva database of environmental news article. Figure 1 illustrates the usage of eight of the most salient labels, of which three emerge as particularly noteworthy: Sustainable Development, Sustainability and Resilience. For this article, we elected to focus on this subset of three labels as the rapid uptake in usage of these terms over the past two decades implies a level of diffusion and institutionalization absent for other labels – including, surprisingly, “environmentalism” itself.
Number of environmental news articles citing the top eight labels.
The second phase of collection and analysis involved creating a timeline of key events associated with environmentalism, which we present in Table 1. We begin with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a treatise on the harmful ecological effects of DDT usage that is widely regarded as triggering the emergence of contemporary environmentalism (Banerjee, 2003; Faber, Jorna, & Engelen, 2005; Hardy & Maguire, 2010; Maguire & Hardy, 2009). We outline key events, including natural disasters and community building marker moments (like major international conferences and/or the launch of new initiatives) but also discursive products (like landmark books, reports and declarations). Our chronology is culled from six environmental timelines produced by international organizations such as the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), Asian Development Bank, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Worldwatch Institute and The New York Times, and only includes those events appearing in three or more of these sources. All key events inscribed in our timeline hence are broadly considered as important markers or turning points.
Key events in environmentalism.
The intent in creating this timeline was two-fold. First, we aimed to chronicle defining moments in the institutionalization process of environmentalism, including not only exogenous shocks like natural catastrophes but also specifying other key discursive and community building events where meaning systems and concepts are shown to evolve (Hardy & Maguire, 2010; Skinner, 1969). We were particularly interested in the categories of actors (e.g., intergovernmental organizations, business groups, scientists) responsible for these initiatives. Secondly – and more crucially – we sought to identify how the three major conceptualizations of environmentalism highlighted in Figure 1 were associated with certain historical events. Therefore, for each of the defining moments identified in Table 1, we examined whether news articles referring to that specific event would also refer to Sustainable Development, Sustainability or Resilience. In doing so, we were able to demonstrate patterns of affiliation between timeline events, actors and labels. As illustrated in Figure 2, the majority of private initiatives on our timeline are associated with Sustainability. The majority of intergovernmental initiatives, on the other hand, are affiliated with the label of Sustainable Development while exogenous events are roughly split among all three labels – albeit with a greater inclination towards Resilience than the other two labels.
Label affiliation according to event type (# of articles).
In the third phase, in order to corroborate our claims that changes in labels are accompanied by changes in meaning/association, we also used Factíva’s classification system to compare label uptake in different news subject domains (e.g., “Corporate News” or “Risk News”). This system uses a proprietary algorithm to identify author information, keywords, event references, etc. in order to classify news articles, press releases and other texts.
In the next section, we begin by investigating the beginning phase of “transnationalization” of environmentalism from previously disparate national concerns (Djelic & Quack, 2007). We then proceed to investigate the subsequent phases of emergence for the three major conceptualizations of sustainable development, sustainability and resilience, explaning how the particular characteristics of each label reflect contextual embeddedness and historical developments. As we analyze the constellation of events, actors, discourses and meaning systems at each of the four junctures – the emergence of transnational environmentalism, sustainable development and re-orientations towards sustainability and resilience – we are able to reveal one dominant mechanism each time. Assimilation is the key mechanism of transnational path emergence; coalescence appears as the main mechanism of path development leading to a sustainable development regime; co-optation is a mechanism of stabilization that entails a re-conceptualization towards sustainability; while recombination is a mechanism of path re-orientation promoting resilience. These four mechanisms are key to the long-run structuration and transformation of the transnational environmentalist trajectory.
Transnational Environmentalism and its Conceptual Evolution
Environmentalism, as a movement, predates our selected starting point of the mid-twentieth century: the origins of environmental concerns are rooted in the industrialization of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intense mining, land drainage, deforestation and highly polluting factory production accompanying the first industrial revolution generated polarizing reactions in England, France and Germany, later spreading to the United States (Fiege, 2011; McCormick, 1991). However, such developments resulted in piecemeal national responses, up to and including the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. From the latter half of the twentieth century though, environmental protection became a truly transnational phenomenon (Holmberg, 1992, p. 20; Mebratu, 1998), with two parallel developments: first, a concern with overpopulation and its impact on the planet and global resources as a whole; and second, an increasing reliance on scientific modelling and technical solutions.
Projecting environmentalism at the transnational level
The concern with overpopulation followed the baby boom of the post-war period: in the 1960s a number of neo-Malthusian scientists raised concerns about the potentially adverse impacts of population growth. In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, highlighting the ecological impact of overpopulation (Ehrlich, 1968). Later that year, ecologist Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the journal Science, advocating constraints on man’s “freedom to breed” in order to protect the environment (Hardin, 1968). In parallel, a group of international scientists, policymakers and business leaders gathered to form The Club of Rome, an environmental think tank oriented towards addressing international political issues, foremost among these being population growth. Notable members of the Club included Italian industrialist and scholar Aurelio Peccei, Scotsman Alexander King (at the time, the scientific director of the OECD), a married couple of American environmental scientists named Donella and Dennis Meadows, and an Indian experimental physicist named Ashok Khosla.
In 1972, The Club of Rome released a landmark report entitled The Limits to Growth, which would go on to become the best-selling book in contemporary environmentalism (Stoczkowski, 2009). Donella and Dennis Meadows, who were working at MIT at the time, used a nascent modelling instrument named “System Dynamics” to predict the human impact on the environment. Their report outlined, in Malthusian terms, how existing economic and population growth could not be sustained with finite resources and that mankind should be ready for a “controlled, orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium” (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972, p. 184).
In the same year as the publication of Limits to Growth, the UN held their first Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm attended by representatives from 113 states. The Secretary General of this conference – and of the resulting United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) – was Maurice Strong, a Canadian industrialist and Club of Rome member. An initial focus on population control was opposed by developing countries (particularly India), although scientific solutions featured prominently as one of 26 principles of the official Declaration: “Science and technology … must be applied to the identification, avoidance and control of environmental risks and the solution of environmental problems” (UNEP, 1972). The Stockholm Conference proved effective enough to spur subsequent UN conventions on marine pollution (1973 and 1982), wildlife protection (1975), air pollution (1979), and ozone depletion (1987) all of which referred to the 1972 conference as a triggering event.
Mechanism of transnational path emergence – Assimilation
Based on this sequence of events, we propose that the transformation of environmentalism – from isolated national movements into a transnational issue – resulted from the conjunction of two main developments. First was the linking of environmentalism to neo-Malthusian concerns about population growth in the post-war period. Overpopulation was conceptualized as a “commons” – and therefore an international – problem, the UN holding a first conference on world population in Rome as early as 1954 (Dean, 1992). Global population growth was connected with potentially major resource and environmental consequences – and morphed into a critical environmental issue with a broad international impact and appeal (Robertson, 2012). Environmentalism was hence incorporated with overpopulation issues and a transnational community (Djelic & Quack, 2010) of individual and organizational actors soon mobilized around the problem thus redefined.
A second (and connected) component of the transformation and transnationationalization of environmentalism was the adoption of a science-based perspective and apparatus. In the post-war period, the world science system dramatically expanded, “produc[ing] many organizations and professions that could speak authoritatively and with putative objectivity on a wide range of environmental issues” (Meyer et al., 1997, p. 636). In Table 1, the private events listed between 1962 and 1975 were all initiated by scientists: Carson, Ehrlich and Hardin were biologists by training, while the majority of the Club of Rome members held advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. This, combined with the new predictive models of population growth, created a rationalized impetus to address environmental issues.
We use the term “assimilation” to describe this mechanism of path interaction. The piecemeal issues related to the environment – DDT usage, marine and air pollution, ozone depletion, etc. – were assimilated in the late 1960s and 1970s into global concerns around overpopulation, catalyzed and reinforced by a concurrent wave of scientization. However, this process of transnationalization did not coagulate the various concerns; by and large, they were treated as disparate symptoms of overpopulation, with the actors involved remaining relatively disconnected.
Sustainable development: Reconciling environmentalism and growth
Following the 1972 Stockholm conference, the newly created UNEP coordinated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to draft a strategy that could reconcile development and environmentalism – one aimed at national governments, UN agencies and other intergovernmental bodies (McCormick, 1986). In 1980, IUCN – along with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), UNESCO and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – issued a major report called the “World Conservation Strategy” (WCS). The report systematically aggregated diffuse environmental ideas under one coherent banner, namely the stewardship of resources for future generations (IUCN, 1980, p. I), while also providing the first major mention of the term “sustainable development” as a means of stewardship. However, the impact of the report was ultimately hampered by its focus on conservation of nature and wildlife without an adequate reconciliation of socio-economic issues and, in particular, population growth (McCormick, 1986). By the authors’ own admission the report reflected a compromise, chiefly between “conservationists and the practitioners of development, who differ[ed] in their emphasis on maintenance on the one hand and production on the other” (IUCN, 1980, p. II).
In 1983, UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar approached Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland to form a commission to concretely address issues of environmental degradation, based on the WCS Report. Brundtland assembled a group of ministers from a variety of countries – as well as a special advisory group that included Club of Rome members (WCED, 1987, p. 283) – the objective being to produce “greater co-operation [among] countries at different stages of economic and social development” on environmental issues (United Nations General Assembly, 1983). This group was named The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), also known as the Brundtland Commission.
In October 1987, the Commission issued a report titled Our Common Future – also known as the Brundtland Report – promoting the need to address global and interlocking issues such as ecological protection, energy generation and food production. Of particular consequence was a more accessible and clear definition of the term “sustainable development” than that provided in the WCS report. The concept was redefined as the capacity to “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987). This notion of “intergenerational equity” would become the cornerstone of environmentalist discourse in the following decades (Banerjee, 2003; Mebratu, 1998), being re-affirmed at subsequent UN summits in 1992, 2002 and 2012 and initiating an explosion of work on issues of development and the environment (Sneddon, Howarth, & Norgaard, 2006).
Mechanism of path development – Coalescence
As outlined earlier, the transformation of environmentalism into a transnational issue was facilitated through assimilation into broader trends – i.e., scientization and concerns about overpopulation. These initiatives (and the actors behind them) were initially only loosely affiliated with one another, resulting in a multitude of conventions in the 1970s around marine and air pollution, wildlife preservation, human settlement management and ozone protection based upon the Stockholm Declaration. Arguably, this loose coupling and fragmentation within bonds was what made aggregation under a very broad umbrella possible.
On the other hand, the fragmentation in meaning and loose coupling also explains in part the limited impact of the WCS report as well as the success of the Brundtland Report. IUCN had held the name the International Union for Protection of Nature until 1956 and despite the name change, continued advocating principles of wildlife protection. Thus, while UNEP was pushing for “conservation” i.e., reconciliation of development and environmentalism, IUCN was seemingly advocating preservation at the expense of development (McCormick, 1986, p. 185). The admission of compromise by the WCS authors contrasted sharply with The Brundtland Commission that took development as a foundational principle and successfully aggregated previously distinct issues (e.g., international security, resource scarcity, overpopulation, social exclusion) into one comprehensive construct of Sustainable Development.
We argue that these developments reflect a second mechanism of path generation that we label as “Coalescence”. Coalescence refers to the formation of a distinct transnational path that aggregates and connects disparate issues within a unified – albeit broad – construct. The Brundtland Report was able to accomplish this by scaffolding environmental issues upon a foundation of human development, a principle that succeeded in mobilizing multiple stakeholders. As evidenced by the failure of the WCS report, the lack of a coherent ideological basis had previously prevented such coalescence from occurring.
In the following section, we outline how the label “sustainability” evolved from an offshoot of sustainable development into a standalone conceptualization of environmentalism. Although the term sustainability had already been in use during the issuing of the Brundtland Report, it was conceptually intertwined with the notion of sustainable development until the late 1990s. Despite being used sparingly in those early years, by the first decade of the new millenium it rapidly eclipsed sustainable development in discourse. We therefore investigate the events leading to this digression, proceeding to highlight the specific associations with this label – including how it differs from sustainable development – and indicate the underlying path generation mechanisms.
The digression of sustainability from sustainable development
Although the Brundtland Report generated political consensus with a broad roadmap for future development, challenges to the agenda quickly emerged. Participants from developing nations, echoing concerns from Stockholm in 1972, noted that “sustainable development” failed to sufficiently address problems such as poverty and social inclusion (Lélé, 1991). From an operational perspective, the overarching conceptualization was still politically contested with ill-defined boundaries (Lélé, 1998; McManus, 1996); such ambiguity allowed various interest groups to operationalize sustainable development according to their own particular needs, and by 1990, over 140 operational – and conflicting – definitions had emerged (Johnston et al., 2007; Lélé, 1991). This fragmentation of sustainable development was particularly consequential during the 1990s as one interest group capitalized upon the ambiguity to institutionalize a divergent conceptualization of environmentalism.
Six years after the 1972 Stockholm conference, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) – the largest business advocacy organization in the world – established a Commission on the Environment. The aim was to “promulgate sound environmental policies for industry and prepare business input into intergovernmental and other international projects” (Tryzna, Margold, & Osborn, 1996, p. 93). The Commission subsequently organized a high-profile World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM I) in 1984 and by 1990 had succeeded in becoming the sole representative of business interests at a preparatory ministerial meeting in Bergen for the upcoming Rio Summit.
At that meeting, UNEP Director Maurice Strong met with a Swiss businessman named Stephan Schmidheiny, soon after appointing him as chief adviser for business and industry at Rio (Johnson, 2012). Schmidheiny had advocated businesses making “creative contributions” to ecological legislation and meeting the “emotion of ecologists” with “economic truth” (Schmidheiny & BCSD, 1992; Sklair, 2001, p. 205). He also coined the highly popular term “eco-efficiency” to improve the business appeal of sustainability (Schmidheiny & BCSD, 1992). Schmidheiny would proceed to establish the (World) Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), an organization that would inherit the role of business representative from ICC at all subsequent UN environmental events. Numerous other green networks emerged in the following years with similar modi operandi to WBCSD, notably emphasizing “self-assessment and voluntary codes where possible, but a decisive input into regulation where necessary” (Sklair, 2001, p. 205).
Inspired by the successful launch of the ISO 9000 quality control program in 1987, Schmidheiny and Strong lobbied the director-general of the International Organization of Standards (ISO) to develop an environmental management system (EMS) for sustainable development. ISO had already been deliberating the construction of a standardized EMS since the late 1980s, as a means to mitigate potential trade barriers arising from the different national environmental schemes emerging at the time (Clapp, 1998). A Strategic Advisory Group on the Environment, primarily composed of representatives from private-sector firms and international trade and standards associations, was formed to provide recommendations on a new standard that would comply with the Agenda 21 declaration from Rio. In 1996, ISO launched their 14000 certification series, an EMS template consisting of two components: Environmental Auditing and Environmental Performance Evaluation (Cascio, Woodside, & Mitchell, 1996; Tibor & Feldman, 1996). A number of other standards, indices and organizations spun off from ISO 14000, particularly within the private sector where a coalition of WBCSD members – who were also CEOs of major multinational firms – pushed for the development of the Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index (DJSI) in 1999 (Clapp, 1998; Prestbo, 2000).
In the ensuing 15 years, sustainability became the dominant conceptual regime of environmentalism. Performance indicators, benchmarks, certification programs and standards for sustainability diffused widely, from the GRI to LEED building codes, Social Accountability (SA8000) standards, Forestry Stewardship Council and Fair Trade certifications (Boström & Hallström, 2010; Clapp, 1998). Auditing processes, including Triple Bottom Line accounting and indices such as the Environmental Sustainability/ Performance Index and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have similarly exploded, leading to a proliferation of indicators unprecedented in the environmental movement. Within organizations, Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives were reframed into Corporate Sustainability programs (Dyllick & Hockerts, 2002), in combination with the creation of new professions and roles – sustainability consultants, managers, specialists, and even Chief Sustainability Officers (Lubin & Esty, 2010; Wright, Nyberg, & Grant, 2006).
The distinguishing features of sustainability
What have been the conceptual consequences of this digression of sustainability from its precedessor concept? In 2001, UNESCO outlined a conceptual distinction between the two: sustainable development was designated as a process and pathway of growth, while sustainability was the desired end-state or outcome (UNESCO, 2012, p. 5). However, the preceding historical account of the development of sustainability indicates more fundamental differences between the two concepts. A content analysis of how the two terms are used proves to be particularly informative.
The first difference is reflected in Figure 3, which illustrates the percentage of environmental news articles classified by Factíva as also being “Corporate/Industrial News” and “Political/International Relations News” for each of the two labels (excluding those articles using both labels interchangeably). Despite the presumed synonymity between the two terms, when examined in isolation, sustainability is demonstrated here as having a stronger corporate and industrial orientation than sustainable development, a distinction remaining consistent since the mid-1990s. The difference is even more prominent when observing environmental discourse within the political/international relations sphere. Less than 10% of environmental articles per year exclusively use the term Sustainability, compared with 30-50% for sustainable development between 2006 and 2013. Within this domain, the latter concept remains the dominant conceptualization.
Percentage of environmental news articles classified as “Corporate/Industrial News” or “Political/International Relations”, by label.
Another distinguishing feature of sustainability is a reliance on metrics and reporting systems to produce transparency and efficiency. Figure 4 examines the same corpus of articles as in Figure 3 to determine the percentage of articles referring to “transparency” or “efficiency” with respect to both sustainability and sustainable development. Over the 15 year period, these terms appear in only 15% of sustainable development articles, compared with 28% for sustainability news.
Percentage of environmental news articles mentioning “transparency” or “efficiency” for each label (excluding articles using both labels).
Mechanism of path stabilization – Co-optation
Although the Brundtland Report successfully aggregated environmental issues under the umbrella of sustainable development, the ambiguity of the concept also opened up space for contestation and appropriation of meaning. We demonstrate above that this allowed a third mechanism of path generation to occur: sustainability is an offshoot that has been appropriated and re-conceptualized as a corporate and performance-oriented form of environmentalism. Since the turn of millennium, this term has gradually overshadowed its predecessor, with the locus of environmental responsibility shifting from intergovernmental and state-led environmental programs to transnational private-sector initiatives (Dyllick & Hockerts, 2002; Sklair, 2001).
In examining the specificity of co-optation, we observe that sustainability results from the “managerialization” of environmentalism. Managerialization can be defined as the institutional pressure for “greater transparency … efficiency and ‘customer’ orientation [and] the generalization of competition and market mechanisms” (Djelic, 2006, p. 72). It is, in itself, an institutional trajectory, stemming from the broader introduction of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and occurring in concert with the “audit explosion” of the 1990s, when the practice of auditing flourished as a means of verification and a signal of quality assurance (Power, 1997). A basic yet notable feature of auditing – and managerialization – is a normative orientation towards technical and output related ideals, e.g., “cost effectiveness”, “efficiency” and “quality” (Power, 1997, p. 91). Such ideals necessitate the construction of myriad performance measurement systems and indicators designed to making things “auditable”, even if the link to output is tenuous (Power, 1997, p. 115). As a result of managerialization, environmentalism has become rationalized, characterized by audits, strategic plans, quantitative evaluations, and consultants (Hwang & Powell, 2009). The identification of sustainability as an “outcome” by UNESCO in 2001 marks a major discursive demarcation between process and result-oriented approaches to environmentalism, the latter being characterized by environmental ratings systems, consultancies and management roles.
We use the term “Co-optation” to describe this mechanism of path generation. Here, a specific label of environmentalism was appropriated by business interests and imbued with new meaning, diverging from the umbrella concept of sustainable development. Co-optation is a distinct path generation mechanism in that it is one-directional: ICC and BCSD pushed for discretionary corporate initiatives combined with an institutionalized involvement in regulation. Hence, the mechanism is in this case skewed to favor the interests of business stakeholders with little reciprocal influence from the environmental community (Sklair, 2001).
In examining the history of this co-optation, we can identify interaction points between the trajectories of environmentalism and managerialization. Maurice Strong and the ICC were early advocates of business involvement in drafting environmental policy-making; fora such as WICEM were minor yet consequential events where a unified corporate/industrial position on environmentalism coagulated. As documented by numerous scholars though, one of the primary catalyzers is Stephen Schmidheiny himself (McManus, 1996; Mebratu, 1998; Redclift, 2005). Beginning with his appointment at the Rio Summit, Schmidheiny’s desire to imitate the ISO 9000 system, and his activities with the WBCSD demonstrate the mechanism by which the practice of audit entered the sustainable development movement. The diffusion of the ISO 14000 standards and the consequent emergence of myriad sustainability indicators and certification systems (e.g., DJSI, Fairtrade, Principles for Responsible Investment, etc.) similarly demonstrate the strong ongoing influence of managerialization on environmentalism.
From sustainability to resilience
Although sustainability is still the dominant conceptualization in current ecological discourse, we propose that a distinct conceptual offshoot has already started to take shape in the form of “resilience”. In early conceptualizations of sustainability during the 1990s, risk was only a marginal inclusion in prevailing discourse. However, the indicators and standards developed during the sustainability episode have, since the turn of the 21st century, been increasingly perceived as inadequate for predicting and handling the impacts of crises, whether environmental or structural (Gray & Wiedemann, 1999). As such, environmentalism is increasingly shifting towards a conceptualization of “resilience”, or the capacity for systems to handle risk and to prevent, endure and recover from crises and shocks.
Conceptualizing resilience – Environmentalism as risk management
Resilience is a term grounded in systems ecology, first appearing in an academic article by Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling in 1973. Modelling the relationship between populations of predator and prey, Holling provided an alternative to classical equilibrium-based theories of ecological systems – including those contained within the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972, p. 184) – proposing instead that such systems remain cohesive even when fluctuating within certain parameters he called “domains of attraction” (Holling, 1973). He labelled this cohesion as “resilience”, or the “measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance” (Holling, 1973, p. 14). In the early years following his publication, Holling’s conceptualization gained little traction in the ecology community, mainly because it deviated from prevailing single equilibrium theories of system behavior. The domains of attraction theory was thus largely received as a modelling exercise, lacking sufficient empirical evidence to apply to real world phenomena (Folke, 2006).
For two decades, resilience was sparingly used outside the field of ecology, until Holling and members of the Swedish Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics founded in 1999 the Resilience Alliance, comprised of a consortium of scientists promoting “social-ecological resilience” (Folke, 2006; Walker & Cooper, 2011). This was an expanded definition allowing urban settlement and coastal community vulnerability to be incorporated into the resilience fold. In 2007, Holling’s co-author (and co-founder of the Alliance) Carl Folke established the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a major think tank promoting social-ecological resilience policy-making to state and intergovernmental organizations (Walker & Cooper, 2011).
During the 1990s, Holling also set a distinction between his conceptualization and the environmental science usage of “engineering resilience”, defined as the rate of system return to stability after perturbation (Folke, 2006; Holling, 1996; Martin & Sunley, 2014). Ironically, in distinguishing the two, he popularized the latter: the revised notion of engineering resilience proliferated in a number of domains following the events of September 11th 2011, being deployed most prominently in national security and disaster/accident management discourse (Figure 5). Terror attacks and tsunamis, both occurring in 2005 and 2011, only served to catalyze diffusion during those two years (Walker & Cooper, 2011).
The three news classifications that most often mention resilience (# of articles).
Resilience in the environmental domain, however, lagged until actors within the insurance industry introduced the term within the area of climate change. Having absorbed excess claims stemming from major disasters in the 1990s, large reinsurers like Munich Re and Swiss Re became progressively more vocal regarding changing weather patterns (Tucker, 1997). Within Munich Re, two scientists named Gerhard Berz and Thomas Loster were particularly proactive. Berz headed the Geoscience Research Group, and apart from publishing an annual review on natural catastrophes, he was the sole private-sector representative on the taskforce leading to the 2001 creation of UN-ISDR (Berz, Loster, & Wirtz, 2001; ECOSOC, 2001). Loster, also within the Geoscience Research Group, participated in the first World Conference for Disaster Reduction (WCDR) in 2005, leading to the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), a 10 year, multi-stakeholder agenda aimed at reducing global vulnerability to disasters. During this time, Loster was also chair of the Climate Change Working Group at the UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI) as well as of the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, an organization seeking to influence policy processes (such as the UNFCCC Climate Negotiations) using best practices derived from Munich Re (MCII, 2012). In 2013, UNEP-FI launched a Global Resilience program targeted at the insurance industry, partnering with major insurers such as AXA, The Co-operators, Swiss Re and Tokio Marine and Nichido (UNEP-FI, 2013). UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon commented on the impact of the insurance industry in environmentalism, noting:
For years, insurers have been at the forefront of the corporate world in alerting society to the risks of climate change and, more recently, threats such as the loss of biological diversity and the growing pressures on … essential ecosystems. (UNEP-FI, 2012)
Resilience has had a notable effect on organizations of all kinds. At the transnational level, the UN, IMF, World Bank and World Economic Forum have incorporated a significant number of resilience strategies into their agendas (Hausler, 2005; UN-ISDR, 2004; World Bank, 2006; World Economic Forum, World Bank, & UN-ISDR, 2008). For example, UNDP, in conjunction with UNEP, World Bank and World Resources Institute issued a report in 2008 titled “Roots of Resilience” advancing the idea of socio-ecological resilience for local communities. The concept has most notably diffused in urban governance, with alliances forming around municipal protection against disaster (ISDR, 2008; Martin & Sunley, 2014). Within the corporate sector, SustainAbility, one of the most prominent environmental consultancies, proposes that “securing our future has become less about accountability and conservation and more about disruptive, transformational change and creating value by delivering on societal needs such as access to energy, food and healthcare”. 1
The distinguishing features of resilience
Shifting somewhat from the definition outlined by Holling, resilience is now conceptualized as the capacity of a social-ecological system to not only absorb shock but also to progressively learn and adapt (Folke et al., 2002). This label exhibits notably different characteristics from its previous configurations, with resilience discourse promoting engagement with environmental, social and economic issues as a risk reduction strategy. Audits, indicators and measurement systems previously used to advance environmental, social and economic goals have now branched off towards promotion of preparedness and stability. The aim now is to create conditions that will allow human systems to persist in the event of unforeseeable disruptions. Figure 6 outlines the difference among the three labels by how often they refer to five terms of “risk”, “security, “crisis”, “disaster” and/or “disruption”. Figure 6 also serves to illustrate how the labels of sustainability and sustainable development have noticeably shifted towards including resilience-style discourse.
Percentage of environmental news articles mentioning “risk”, “security, “crisis”, “disaster” and/or “disruption” for each label.
Mechanism of path re-orientation: Recombination
We propose that the evolution of resilience, as an environmental label, stems from the pervasive impact of a trajectory of risk management. The past 30 years have been characterized by the emergence and institutionalization of the “risk society” (Beck, 1992), where an increasing “preoccup[ation] with the future (and also with safety) … generates notion[s] of risk” (Giddens & Pierson, 1998, p. 209). Ideas about risk have become an institutionalized feature of modern organizations in a variety of domains (Beck, 2006; Denney, 2005): aside from private-sector companies, “hospitals, schools, universities, and many other public organizations, including the very highest levels of central governments, have all been invaded to varying degrees by ideas about risk and its management” (Power, 2004, p. 9). As with other facets of organizational life, risk in these organizations is made to be auditable and governable (Power, 2004, 2007).
The risk society is the product of environmental disasters in the 1980s, specifically the Chernobyl nuclear accident (Beck, 1987, 1992; Giddens & Pierson, 1998). While previous disasters were largely perceived as unpredictable and immeasurable, Chernobyl was one of the first to be considered as stemming from “manufactured risk”, an event that could have been both anticipated and avoided (Beck, 1992). Compounding this development was a string of catastrophes that adversely affected the insurance industry: Between 1987 and 1992, 15 catastrophic events each resulted in insurance claims of over $1 billion, while no single catastrophe for the previous 20 years had ever topped $1 billion (Tucker, 1997). This dramatic shift provoked a pronounced effort by underwriters – in concert with property management firms and emergency service associations – to spread risk management practices as a means to mitigate claims. Capitalizing upon heightened public concern about risk, these organizations spurred the construction of transnational bodies specializing in risk governance such as the IRGC (International Risk Governance Council) in 2003, a state-created and privately financed Swiss foundation oriented towards the creation of a global risk management framework (Renn & Walker, 2008).
The development of resilience, as an environmental label, illuminates a mechanism of path generation that is distinct from those previously observed. Resilience is a term defined by ecology scholars, but it did not diffuse into the environmental movement until it was (inadvertently) repackaged by Holling into a more acceptable equilibrium-based conceptualization. Even then, it only became institutionalized outside the environmental sphere, and did not spread within environmentalism until it was reframed as being compatible with the risk society – a trajectory that is itself the discursive product of external ecological shocks. This linkage through recombination was facilitated by actors from the insurance industry, specifically through the bridge of climate change. As such, the paths of resilience and risk society are both rooted in environmentalism. The attribution of past disasters, accidents and catastrophes to resilience (as illustrated in Figure 2) speaks to the idea that such exogenous events are treated as anomalous to the equilibrium of intergenerational equity (UN-ISDR, 2004).
Discussion
Our analysis indicates how the concept of environmentalism, treated as homogenous and static, is in reality fluid, temporal and multifaceted. The major conceptualizations of this institution do not transition sequentially from one to another; rather, they coexist, with each label persisting in closer association with a specific organizational sphere. Sustainable development, for example, was negotiated in intergovernmental fora and thus has strong political/international relations connotations. Meanwhile, sustainability was crafted by business actors into a rationalized, outcome driven and measurement-oriented label, demonstrating a clear affinity with for-profit organizations. More recently, resilience has emerged as a keyword for organizations concerned with risk management, whether operating within the fields of national security, disaster management or insurance. While these three labels fall under the same broad canopy – and while their respective domains certainly overlap – their stark conceptual differences indicate the difficulty in creating a single, unified conceptualization for environmentalism.
With respect to theory, in tracing the creation of these three labels – and the more fundamental emergence of transnational environmentalism – we are able to delineate an institutional trajectory (David & Strang, 2006; Djelic & Quack, 2007). There are characteristics of path dependence involved in the entrenchment of environmentalism into an institution, facilitated by – and resulting in – considerable regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures (Scott, 2014). However, following institutionalization, we note incremental yet consequential shifts in discourse, spearheaded within different organizational domains. Conventional path dependence accounts are ill-suited for explaining this transformation: the evolutionary path we outline is largely devoid of any exogenous shocks required within traditional punctuated equilibrium accounts (Gersick, 1991; Haveman & Rao, 1997). Similarly, we do not witness outcomes consistent with “purposive” action on the part of key individuals (Lawrence et al., 2010; Munir & Phillips, 2005). Although some individuals and organizations do act as boundary-spanners (e.g., Schmidheiny or the Club of Rome) – and therefore are the conduits for path interactions –such actors generally found themselves in the right position to transpose practices through happenstance. Even then, these self-interested efforts were only cumulatively consequential, with effects that would have been largely unanticipated by any single actor (Clemente, Durand, & Roulet, 2016). Relatedly, we do not witness a unified narrative holding together a path and turning it into a taken-for-granted frame, as is supposed by path creation (Czarniawska, 1998; Garud et al., 2010). We see instead a multiplicity of narratives, with greater presence and impact in different domains, waxing and waning over time based on distinct institutional conditions.
In examining the evolution of environmentalism, we reveal a process of path generation: we explain the direction(s) of the trajectory as the result of consequential interactions with other institutional paths. We began by tracing the emergence of transnational environmentalism as a product of linkages with existing movements such as scientization and overpopulation. Path development and institutionalization then continued by aggregating diffuse transnational issues under one umbrella of “sustainable development”. The subsequent events that alter the trajectory – i.e., the developments of sustainability and resilience – result from the effects of managerialization and audit society on the one hand and of the risk society on the other; those being all trajectories in their own right.
In following this process, we are able to identify four mechanisms of interaction: Assimilation, Coalescence, Co-optation, and Recombination. These mechanisms reflect aggregated episodes of agentic work and sense-making that are only cumulatively consequential. We document a long-run process of creolization that brings together in a constantly dynamic and re-invented manner – and through a multiplicity of agentic moves – a plurality of institutional trajectories that are bound to each other and define, in their intersection, something that is both new and derived.
In tracing the emergence and transformation processes of environmentalism, we can also theorize more broadly about the path dependent nature of institutional trajectories. We demonstrate through the emergence of sustainable development and the “branching off” of sustainability and resilience that consequential shifts can occur in transnational space. We highlight how organizations that provided the main impetus for this changing discourse were diverse in character yet unmistakably transnational: these not only included supranational organizations like the UN, but also associational groups like the Club of Rome, WBCSD and corporations like Munich Re. In this respect, environmentalism illustrates how trajectories can evolve in a space that is largely disconnected from national contexts.
Conclusion
In this article, we outlined how environmentalism was aggregated from piecemeal movements into an entrenched path in transnational space; we subsequently followed, through time, the conceptual evolution of this institutional trajectory, and the process of label development and affiliation with different organizational spheres. We proposed that these episodes of emergence and conceptual change were the result of incremental yet consequential interactions with other transnational paths, where the actions of individuals and organizations were only impactful in the aggregate. In this manner, we propose, through the exploration of environmentalism an illustrative case of how path generation operates at the transnational level – which remains rare so far in the path generation literature (Djelic & Quack, 2007; Siggelkow, 2007).
Through our case study, we contribute to theory development by elucidating specific mechanisms of trajectory interactions that allow us to understand transformative change. Although mechanisms different from the ones we identify may operate in other cases, our exploration does open an area of research into incremental yet transformative change. As such, we not only complement a growing body of work on path generation (Antikainen, 2010; Djelic & Quack, 2005, 2007), but also contribute to recent discussions on path dependence, providing one plausible structural explanation of transformation in the absence of radical rupture or acts of institutional entrepreneurship (Clemente et al., 2016; Crouch & Farrell, 2004; Munir & Phillips, 2005; Schreyogg & Sydow, 2011; Vergne & Durand, 2011). We instead situate action as impactful within a constellation of actors, where agency is embedded in historical and institutional strutures (Garud et al., 2007),
Our exploration contains two different kinds of implications for organizations. First we reveal that, far from being a static and homogenous concept, environmentalism across organizations is multifaceted and fluid, with certain labels manifesting themselves more prominently in some organizational spheres compared to others. Each label is shaped to produce specific normative as well as practical and managerial implications for organizational actors; thus far, this semantic diversity has been misconstrued as a signal of ambiguity and incoherence. As a conceptualization, “sustainable development” is a broad canopy. It has little operational and managerial teeth, as it were, but its broad and flexible nature allowed relatively unencumbered socialization and appropriation. Sustainability on the other hand has come with much more stringent operational and managerial implications, with a multiplication of standards and performance indicators steering decision-making in significant ways. Resilience, finally, has entailed similar strategic re-orientations towards risk assessment and management. Second, as a way of broadening the scope and fostering future research, we suggest that the patterns we find might apply to other institutional trajectories that affect organizations (e.g., quality control, transparency, risk management). We would infer that such paths also feature a multiplicity of meanings resulting from interactions with other paths. Future research could explore how different conceptualizations of these trajectories evolve and become embedded within specific organizational domains, specifying in the process alternate mechanisms of path interactions from those we have observed in the case of environmentalism.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.