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Growing scientific evidence suggests that more frequent and severe weather extremes such as heat waves, hurricanes, flooding and droughts will have an increasing impact on organizations, industries and entire economies. These findings call for the development of theoretical and practical frameworks to strengthen the capacity of organizations to respond to such impacts. Yet despite the need to understand what is required to build anticipatory adaptation and organizational resilience to expected impacts, the organizational theory literature offers only limited insights. This paper proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework of organizational adaptation and resilience to extreme weather events for addressing the effects of ecological discontinuities in organizational research and strategic decision-making. Implications and suggestions for future research are offered.

Physical impacts from climate change already pose major challenges for organizations, and the trend is rising. Organization theorists, however, have barely begun to systematically consider the organizational impacts of more and increasingly intense storms, fl oods, droughts, fi res, sea level rise or changing growing seasons as part of their domain of study. Eight organizationally relevant dimensions of climate impacts are identifi ed: severity, temporal scale, spatial scale, predictability, mode, immediacy, state change potential and accelerating trend potential. Combined, their scale, scope and systemic uncertainty suggest future conditions of systemic hyperturbulence in organizational environments, defi ned here as 'massive discontinuous change' (MDC). To build a conceptual foundation for organizations to respond and adapt to MDC, the paper examines contributions from literatures on the management of sustainability, crisis, risk, resilience and adaptive organizational change. It highlights gaps for addressing both business challenges and opportunities from MDC, and suggests avenues for future research.

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In this article we reexamine the relationship between time and processes of institutionalization. We argue that pace and stability, two temporal dimensions of institutionalization, depend on the mechanism used by agents to support the institutionalization process. Drawing from the power literature, we develop four types of mechanisms-influence, force, discipline, and domination-and argue that (1) each type will produce a distinctive pattern of pace and stability, and (2) more complex patterns of pace and stability will result from the combined use of multiple mechanisms.

Firms and industries will have a central role in supporting societal adaptation to the physical impacts of climate change, especially in more directly affected sectors such as agriculture, forestry, construction, or transportation. However, the business and management field has repeatedly been criticized for its lack of engagement with climate change as a pressing issue, and adaptation to the physical impacts of climate change in particular. Our review of adaptation studies in the business and management field suggests that most firm and industry adaptation studies focus on how firms adjust to changing business conditions because of the emergence of new competitors, new products, and markets or because of changed political, economic, and legal conditions; they largely exclude firm adjustments to the changing dynamics of the natural environment. Studies on firm and industry adaptation to climate impacts specifically are beginning to emerge, but they are sparse. There is still little cross‐disciplinary work integrating findings from the natural sciences into business thinking. We also find few considerations of the implications and consequences of climate change for firms and industries to date. This article provides an overview over the existing literature on firm adaptation to climate change, outlines research gaps, and suggests pathways for future research. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:397–416. doi: 10.1002/wcc.214 This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation

Internal processes of corporate greening have received little scholarly attention. A two-study investigation of consumer-goods producers, implementing environmental management and subject to the 1991 German Packaging Ordinance offers new insights. Findings from Study 1, an exploratory factor analysis, suggest two independent dimensions of environmental management: Policy Commitment and Approach to Implementation. We expand traditional strategic change models, and generate a typology of four types of corporate greening: Deliberate Reactive, Unrealized, Emergent Active, and Deliberate Proactive greening. These are fleshed out with four known cases in Study 2. Alternative conceptual scenarios, developed to explain those types with inconsistent values for Policy Commitment and Implementation, point to new directions for research on the dynamics of internal processes of corporate greening. We conclude with implications for corporate social performance and strategic process models.

This study examines unfolding organizational learning processes at MacMillan Bloedel, a company which, after years of resisting stakeholder pressures for change, disengaged from the field’s dominant paradigm and developed a new solution. We elaborate the Crossan, Lane and White multi–level framework of organizational learning processes, finding support for the four feedforward learning processes they identified (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing), and adding two action–based learning processes: ‘attending’ and ‘experimenting’. We introduce the concept of a ‘legitimacy trap’ to describe an organization’s over–reliance on institutionalized knowledge when external challenges arise. The trapped organization rejects external challenges of its legitimacy when it perceives the sources of those challenges to be illegitimate. Feedforward learning is blocked as the organization escalates its commitment to its institutionalized interpretations and actions. Taking a grounded theory approach, we discuss how individuals attend to new stimuli and engage in intuiting about them, how groups interpret, experiment with and integrate new solutions, and how the firm validates and institutionalizes the successful solution. Facilitators and impediments of each of these learning processes are identified. Our additions to the model recognize the importance of context in organizational learning processes, and suggest how power may impact organizational learning.