Abstract
The connection between organization studies and history has been a recurrent theme in both domains. As Wadhwani and Bucheli (2014, p. 3) note, ‘historical reasoning emphasizes temporally contextualized explanations of organizations and markets and the methodological challenges of assigning significance and meaning to incomplete and temporally distant evidence from the past’. Geoffrey Jones is a professor of business history at Harvard who has published historical studies on the rise of multinationals and global capitalism and on the global beauty industry, thus applying historical reasoning to the domain of management and organization studies. In his new book Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship, Jones maps the development of green entrepreneurship from the nineteenth century to today. He offers a wide range of insights from industries as diverse as organic food, architecture, tourism and waste management. Jones presents these insights through the lens of ‘green entrepreneurs’, who he describes as ‘a cohort of entrepreneurs who believed business could help create a more sustainable world’ (p. 3). Focusing on these special individuals, the book is divided in two main parts: ‘green intentions’ and ‘green business’. The first part looks into the foundation of ‘green capitalism’ from the nineteenth century to 1980, whereas the second part considers the period from 1980 till now, when environmental concerns have become way more prominent throughout society. In these sections, Jones examines entrepreneurs’ motivations to embark on this green entrepreneurship journey, how they executed their strategies and to what outcomes these have led. In this review I will first characterize both sections in more detail and then discuss the contribution of this book to organization studies.
Jones broadly defines green entrepreneurship as involving ‘the establishment of for-profit businesses motivated by a desire to achieve environmental sustainability’ (p. 13). The first areas in which Jones sees such entrepreneurship are food and energy. As demands for large-scale food production grew, several entrepreneurs in the nineteenth century decided to focus on healthy food; oftentimes these businesses grew out of social and religious movements, such as the Kellogg Cereal Company. As Jones argues, ‘the founders of these businesses were fundamentally motivated by concerns that the industrialization of food and unhealthy urban lifestyles were ruining people’s health, and posed a threat to society’ (p. 1) while those entrepreneurs pioneering wind and sun energy also spotted some clear market opportunities. Between the 1930s and 1950s, ‘environmental advocates struggled to appeal to wider constituencies across the world’ (p. 55). Jones offers rich accounts of how the entrepreneurs involved tried to establish their businesses and to connect to mainstream economic activity, be it in food, beauty, energy or building. Despite considerable barriers in these decades around the Second World War, according to Jones, entrepreneurs such as Yves Rocher and Frank Lloyd Wright succeeded in laying foundations for more sustainable practices through their efforts. In the 1960s and 1970s the second wave of environmentalism unfolded, sparked by broad societal concerns over water pollution and the use of pesticides and stimulated by the rise of new social movements that focused on human rights issues, questioning existing social and political frameworks. Environmental issues were of general concern and businesses in general were increasingly scrutinized for their environmental performance. These developments gave rise to initiatives and experiments in many countries and industries, as Jones shows, even though green entrepreneurs struggled to take advantage of the changed context as ‘their businesses were largely disconnected from the central concerns of the new environmentalism’ (p. 124). Still, these developments laid the groundwork for successful businesses in later years, as discussed in Part 2 of the book. Yet, before turning to these green businesses and their business models, Jones devotes a chapter to what he terms ‘accidental sustainability’, highlighting how in the waste and tourism industries environmental concerns were important drivers for the development of these industries; both had positive outcomes in improving people’s living conditions but also shared a negative impact, causing environmental damage. Jones shows how the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s impacted both these industries; environmental regulations reframed waste as an environmental issue while tourism was strongly supported as a positive force for development.
The title of the first chapter in Part 2 of the book marks a change in approach: ‘Making money by saving the world.’ In this chapter, Jones highlights a range of green entrepreneurs who were able to take advantage of the changing environmental mindset. As he notes: ‘the linking of environmental concerns with the wider concept of sustainability eased the way for businesses to claim a role in forging potential solutions’ (p. 177). Examples ranging from consultants to organic food, and from greener buildings to eco-tourism are discussed, highlighting how green entrepreneurs created successful enterprises that were emphasizing their environmental impact: ‘a singular achievement was the diffusion of the concept that making money and saving the planet were genuinely compatible’ (p. 219). As Jones rightfully acknowledges, the rise of liberal capitalism and the retreat of state intervention allowed for these initiatives to be taken, but creating and growing new green enterprises was still not easy: a notable problem here involved scaling in order to compete with vested conventional counterparts. To deal with this problem, the most rigorous ecological standards often were diluted, giving rise to debates on their legitimacy and on the building of green institutions overall. In Chapter 6 Jones discusses these processes of institutionalization, outlining how standards and certification were being developed, how they spread across industries and finally examining whether standards and certification help explain the expansion of the studied industries. In this chapter the author presents several interesting cases of struggles around standards and certifications, pointing at the variety of initiatives and the difficulties they faced in several industries and countries. Next to more mundane problems such as fraud or scepticism, underlying problems involved definitional struggles, like what the term ‘organic’ actually meant, or on what defined the ‘eco-tourism’ industry. Certification and codification required metrics and agreement on these metrics, which proved to be challenging: ‘Once certification was extended to wider constituents, who did not share strong ideological beliefs and were responsible to shareholders for making profits, the process of setting metrics typically, perhaps inevitable, started with the lowest common denominator’ (p. 262). The financial sector stepped in, turning certification (also) into a matter of compliance. In Chapter 7 Jones discusses this sector’s role, focusing on risk and opportunity assessment and showing how new initiatives were taken to ensure fund-raising for green entrepreneurship; sustainable and social banks were founded and pioneers experimented with socially responsible investment (SRI), partly in response to the spread of shareholder activism. A reporting industry consequently emerged, leading to the start of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the development of several sustainability indexes and impact investment emerged. Yet, all in all, these initiatives only accounted for a small portion of the entire financial industry and the number of green investors remained relatively small. Hence, what could be the role of government? In Chapter 8 Jones discusses collaborations between government and business in waste management and wind and solar energy, comparing the situation in the United States and Europe. ‘In both cases governments became shapers of markets and co-creators of the rapidly expanding recycling and renewable energy industries’ (p. 311). Through policy measures like tax incentives and subsidies, governments attempted to align profits with sustainability, increasing the attractiveness of alternative, greener solutions to waste management and energy production. Despite their positive effects, these policies also gave rise to counterproductive corporate behaviour, as Jones illustrates. This raises concerns about the boundaries of sustainability. In Chapter 9 Jones therefore discusses the limitations of corporate environmentalism, discussing greenwashing as ‘the gap between corporate rhetoric and reality [which] presented almost as big a challenge as had the past neglect of environmental challenges’ (p. 379), arguing that ‘rhetoric too often drowned out urgency’ (p. 379). In the concluding chapter, he revisits his book and discusses outcomes of the movement towards more sustainability. Despite the many positive outcomes, Jones also is sceptical: ‘History shows that profits and sustainability have been hard to reconcile. This is still the case’ (p. 400). He nevertheless concludes by emphasizing that green entrepreneurs have played an important role in putting environmental concerns on the agenda, both for business and for policy-makers, and have contributed to raising awareness to issues of sustainability within society.
Jones has offered a systematic, detailed and eloquently written account, rich in examples and addressing a whole range of themes that are relevant to the fields of management and organization studies. Whether one looks at the role of standard setting and certification, the creation of markets or the role of social movements, within this broad account a lot of intriguing insights can be found. Different levels of analysis are combined in this book, from the fate of individual green entrepreneurs like Rudolf Steiner and Anita Roddick, to the development of businesses such as Kellogg’s Cornflakes, or entire new fields such as the SRI industry. These cases come from a wide variety of countries, although mainly from the West. The long(er) time horizon of the book goes beyond the time scales we often focus on in management and organization studies, underlining the value of a historical, contextualized approach to understanding contemporary phenomena, as also argued in the stream of work crossing over both domains (Kipping & Üsdiken, 2014; Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014).
Jones does not just offer detailed descriptions but also aims to determine outcomes of the green entrepreneurial activities and clearly points towards the current economic system as an important constraint in the further uptake of sustainable business. In this way, his account also ties in well with today’s calls for addressing ‘grand challenges’ (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015). Organizational research on constraints for green or sustainable entrepreneurship could build on this historical perspective. Although Jones already offers some cross-references between developments in different industries, countries and times, these interactions are interesting to explore some more: how do green ideas, or green entrepreneurial initiatives, spread or influence each other? How could systems-based approaches help in understanding the linkages between such green entrepreneurial efforts (Boons & Lüdeke-Freund, 2013) and effective sustainable innovation? How about the linkages between micro-, meso- and macro-level initiatives in social innovation (van Wijk, Zietsma, Dorado, de Bakker, & Martí, 2018)? This book could inspire many follow-up studies, trying to unravel how our theories in management and organization studies can help understand the fate of processes of sustainable innovation. Yet, the book also gives rise to critical thoughts on the potential of corporate greening, or more broadly speaking, corporate social responsibility: again, this could be seen as a call for more research, stimulating researchers to also scrutinize the limits of our concepts and their actual impact on society. The urgency of the theme is evident.