Organization & Environment

Most methodology books do not explain how nature—or in the author’s case, heavy wet snow and swampy muskeg—can be an intrinsic part of a qualitative research design. Yet the author’s inability to make sense of the subarctic not only limited her preliminary qualitative analysis, but this lack of skill also nearly killed her. This article describes the author’s emergent belief that first-hand situated knowledge of the local ecology is an essential requirement of effective qualitative inquiry in social—ecological contexts. The author uses data from two ethnographic studies that were published in the Academy of Management Journal (2000) and Organization & Environment (2004) to illustrate this point. She discusses how the local ecology affected her qualitative research design in terms of access, type of data collected, and interpretation of local management practices. The author closes by calling for a renaturing of qualitative inquiry especially as it relates to research on sustainability.

Firms and governments are increasingly turning to voluntary programs such as eco-certification and eco-labeling as core instruments for managing forests. To probe the prospects and limits of this shift toward eco-consumerism as a mechanism for global change, this article analyzes its value for improving forest management globally. It reveals that eco-consumerism is improving some aspects; yet, for both supply and demand-side reasons, the advances are incremental and unequal and overall doing little to slow deforestation. The article therefore highlights the danger of overestimating the potential of voluntary eco-certification and advances a set of policy and management solutions to enhance the effectiveness of eco-consumer initiatives such as forest certification. Solutions include internal incremental adjustments to certification programs, coordinated alongside more fundamental external systemic changes in the marketing, industrial use, and valuation of the world’s forests.

This article sets forth a new theoretical model that holds that local, regional, and global environmental crises are to a significant degree the product of organizational, institutional, and network-based inequality, which provide economic, political, military, and ideological elites with the means to create and control organizational and network-based mechanisms through which they (a) monopolize decision-making power; (b) shift environmental and nonenvironmental costs onto others; (c) shape individuals’ knowledge, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior; and (d) frame what is and is not considered to be good for the environment. These undemocratic mechanisms produce severe environmental harm because they provide elites with the means to achieve goals that are often environmentally destructive and because they are sometimes environmentally destructive in and of themselves, as is the case with military power. After situating their study in the broader literature, the authors describe their theoretical model in detail and present three case studies that identify some of the most important mechanisms through which elites exert power and harm the environment.

Theories in urban political economy and environmental sociology are engaged to assess the extent to which energy consumption in less developed countries is affected by different urban characteristics. Results of first-difference panel model estimates for a sample of less developed countries yield two noteworthy findings. From 1990 to 2005, growth in energy consumption was positively associated with growth in overall urban population and negatively associated with growth in the percentage of a population residing in urban slum conditions. The two divergent effects hold, net of multiple human ecological and political-economic controls. The authors conclude by highlighting the theoretical implications of the findings and the need for more nuanced approaches in future research on such topics.

On the assumption that good theory is informed by praxis and vice versa, the essay brings sociological theory together with the alternative globalization movement. The responses of this emerging global civil society to contemporary environmental crises indicate that understandings of labor and value that evolved with industrial capital need to be broadened. The essay opens up this process with an outline of how capitalist production undermines its own social metabolism, a “metabolic rift,” that is maintained by the ideological separation of ecology and economics. However, from a grassroots perspective, it is clear that a conceptual vacuum exists between these two disciplines—a space in which a third discourse waits to be articulated. This subliminal “other” sphere of labor and value centers on reproduction of the humanity—nature metabolism by those whose labor is marginalized by capital—unpaid caregivers, peasants, and indigenous gatherers. The terms meta-industrial labor and metabolic value spell out the material, rift-healing, contribution of this unnamed international class. The essay seeks recognition for a vernacular science, an integrated movement strategy, and more inclusive social theory.