Building the Future by Looking to the Past

Abstract

Organizations and environment (O&E) researchers focus on either organizational outcomes or environmental outcomes. In this article, the authors argue that these are significantly different approaches to O&E research. The first aims to contribute to organization theory and performance; the latter aims to improve environmental performance. With a starting position that most research published in influential general management journals is of the organizational outcomes variety, the authors reviewed O&E research published from 1995 to 2005 to test this theory. The authors found, in fact, that most research is directed at environmental outcomes. This finding suggests that the most influential general management journals are receptive to environmental research that does not fit neatly into the organizational boxes. Yet, the authors also find that there is room for O&E research to have considerably more impact than there has been so far. This is a call for more high-quality O&E research in general management journals.

Mapping the conceptual structure of environmental management: a co-word analysis

“…These topics have evolved and become related to others, thus enabling progress in the discipline from the beginning, when it focused on the introduction of a green or environmental dimension and its effects on results, up to the present day in which the management of quality, in particular, the development of ISO regulations and topics related to corporate social responsibility, has acquired a great deal of importance. In addition, we have identified that the "observations" proposed by Bansal and Gao (2006) remain current and some of them have been developed. In that sense, environmental management research has a growing role in the main Management and Business journals.…”

“…With regard to the term PERFORMANCE, authors such as Porter and Van der Linde (1995) and Hart and Ahuja (1996) highlight one of the research questions that has attracted the most attention in the area: "Does it pay to be green?" According to Bansal and Gao (2006), one of the specific features of this field of study is that many works analyse the influence of environmental management on economic performance, environmental performance or both.…”

“…Due to complexity, there have been several approaches to structure the field, usually around several main research questions (Sharma 2002, Bansal and Gao 2006, Berchicci and King 2007, Etzion 2007. Three of these questions stand out: 1) What is the environmental strategy and what are the different typologies?…”

“…A second type of studies present literature reviews of environmental management from a generic Management and Business perspective. Bansal and Gao (2006) analyse prior research on organizations and environment. They select the articles published in 11 top Management and Business academic journals from 1995 to 2005 and develop descriptive and narrative analyses of journals, biases and trends.…”

Strategic Philanthropy: Literature Review

“…To review the articles related to strategic philanthropy, the literature search by Montinel and Delgado-Ceballos (2014) was used. Their literature search on corporate sustainability was based on the work of Bansal and Gao (2006) who located articles in the organisations and environment area by searching for keywords among the top academic journals in the field of general management. Bansal and Gao's list of journals was expanded by Montiel (2008) by adding organisational behaviour journals, strategy journals and journals devoted to the social issues of management and sustainability.…”