Abstract
Welcome to the third recently reoriented issue of Organization & Environment! This issue is somewhat of a transitional one, in which we include, in the second half, a number of articles and book reviews that relate to the journal’s previous focus on environmental sociology, to complement several articles, in the first half, on our new theme of sustainability management. While one main motivation in providing this combination was to fulfill commitments of the previous editorial team to authors with whom they worked, we view this blend of perspectives as an opportunity to compare work in these two related fields and, for those readers so inclined, to connect them.
In making this connection, conceptually, a number of similarities between the two fields can be identified. Obviously, both focus on human organizations and the natural environment, including the challenge and solutions of the interaction between these two phenomena, and both have been instrumental as fields in developing interesting sets of research. The most obvious difference between environmental sociology and sustainability management is that the former includes significant attention to movements, economies, sectors, communities, cultures, and society (as these are related to the natural environment), while sustainability management can include attention to those “levels” of human organization, but more often, its scope is the set of environmental (and social) aspects within and between organizations. So sustainability management researchers tend to focus on individual business, government, and nonprofit organizations; on collections of these in the form of associations, alliances, industries, strategic groups, and partnerships; and on entities within them (such as the governing board, top management, supervisors, employees, subsidiaries, departments, task forces, committees, and teams).
Other comparisons between environmental sociology and sustainability management might be identified by researchers in either (or both) fields, such as those regarding political orientation, context versus process distinctions, and problem versus opportunity focus, but our goal in this issue is to consider excellent contributions in each of these two fields and to appreciate efforts to advance both. We lead off this issue with a thought-provoking sustainability management article by Maurizio Zollo, Carmelo Cennamo, and Kerstin Neumann, titled “Beyond What and Why: Understanding Evolution Toward Sustainable Enterprise Models.” After an extensive and intensive review of the relevant literature, they offer a model that incorporates but moves beyond the definitional and motivational questions of sustainability management to include the change and learning processes that they see as key to sustainability management initiatives. They develop a generic organizational adaptive capacity innovation-oriented enterprise model and then tie that to sustainability sources of change and objects of change, resulting in a multifaceted view of environmental, social, and economic sustainability performance.
Second, John Forrer and Karen Mo examine the sustainability management aspects of one well-known business-related nonprofit organization—the Forest Stewardship Council—in their article “From Certification to Supply Chain Strategy: An Analytical Framework for Enhancing Tropical Forest Governance.” They review the experience and the evidence of effectiveness of the Forest Stewardship Council certification program and develop a model in which they incorporate necessary certification program antecedents, compare these with qualitative assessments of the state of the tropical timber sector, and then suggest a number of recommendations to improve certification and related systems applied to this and other natural resource sectors.
Third, in what may be the most provocative article in this issue (and, perhaps, not coincidentally, the work that appears to blend sustainability management with environmental sociology most significantly), Frank Boons assesses the extent to which research in these fields includes direct ecological impact, compared to those that focus on indirect ecological impact or on the natural environment as a metaphor. In “Organizing Within Dynamic Ecosystems: Conceptualizing Socio-Ecological Mechanisms,” he identifies the various classifications of how ecological entities have been incorporated into these and related bodies of literature and builds a model that is intended to encourage a “socio-ecological” systems approach in future research, which would highlight various aspects of direct ecological impact.
The last three articles (followed by two book reviews) were accepted by the previous editorial team and are more oriented toward the field of environmental sociology. We are pleased to include these contributions in this issue to fulfill our predecessors’ commitments, to allow for the comparison of these contributions to the first three on sustainability management described above, and to appreciate and disseminate good-quality research related to organizations and environment. Regarding the latter, each of the articles in this second set addresses organizational aspects of a different natural resource—seafood, water, and milk, respectively.
In “Environmental Movements, Market-Based Approaches, and Neoliberalization: A Case Study of the Sustainable Seafood Movement,” Jason Konefal argues that the sustainable seafood movement contributes to the values of individualism, marketization, and the devolution of regulatory authority, which the author labels, collectively, “neoliberalization,” and which he suggests is one of several market-based approaches that may impede society from transforming toward environmental sustainability. In “A Bottle Half Empty: Bottled Water Commodification and Contestation,” Daniel Jaffee and Soren Newman offer an ethnographic study of two rural U.S. communities in which the multinational corporation, Nestle, is engaged in spring water extraction, highlighting conflicts between those communities and Nestle over the control of these local water resources. And, in “Treadmill Acceleration and Deceleration: Conflicting Dynamics Within the Organic Milk Commodity Chain,” author Adam Diamond assesses the U.S. Northeastern organic dairy commodity supply chain and identifies a production system pace that is both slowing down and speeding up, due to different organic milk regulatory factors. Together, these three articles present a set of arguments that appear to be addressing some of the same issues discussed at the 2013 Academy of Management, the theme of which was Capitalism in Question (at least, insofar as the political-economic system of capitalism influences environmental and social sustainability).
All told, reflecting both our present and past journal themes, respectively, we have two interesting sets of organization and environment research contributions (as well as two book reviews) for you to enjoy. We hope that this entire collection both informs and inspires you to explore these and related topics more broadly and/or deeply in the future. In the months and years ahead, we also hope the journal’s contents prompt you to use the journal more, to submit one or more manuscripts to it, and to contact us to identify how you can become more involved with us in helping Organization & Environment become your premier journal of choice!