Environmental Managers and Institutional Work: Reconciling Tensions of Competing Institutional Logics

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Firms face a variety of institutional logics and one important question is how individuals within firms manage these logics. Environmental managers in particular face tensions in reconciling their firms’ commercial fortunes with demands for greater environmental responsiveness. We explore how institutional work enables environmental managers to respond to competing institutional logics. Drawing on repeated interviews with 55 firms, we find that environmental managers face competition between a market-based logic and an emerging environmental logic. We show that some environmental managers embed the environmental logic alongside the market logic through variations of creation and disruption, thus over time creating institutional change, which can result in blended logics. Others, however, pursue a strategy of status quo or disengagement through maintenance or other forms of disruption, where the two logics coexist in principle but not in practice; instead the market logic retains its dominance. We discuss the implications of our findings for research.

The Relationship of Organisational Value Frames with the Configuration of Alliance Portfolios: Cases from Electricity Utilities in Great Britain

“…Business frame motivates the members of the organisation to focus on growth and financial metrics such as profit and loss [18]. Organisations with a business frame may perceive sustainability initiatives as a cost [48]. The business frame is associated with short-termism [49] and shareholder value [50].…”

“…The environmental frame demonstrates an ethical responsibility towards nature and going beyond compliance for the environment [48]. Organisations with an environmental frame perceive environmental issues as systemic issues and prioritise the environment's carrying capacity [46,54].…”

“…Organisations with a paradoxical frame listen to the voice of stakeholders to gain knowledge about problems that they have limited knowledge on [18]. Their opinions on contradictory forces are not in fierce competition but rather in symbiosis [48]. Therefore, as opposed to viewing one frame as more central and another frame more peripheral [48,57], they feel both frames as central and blended.…”

Corporate Sustainability Management and Environmental Ethics

“…In this special section, Dahlmann and Grosvold (2017) focus upon the role of the environmental manager as the linchpin within the organization to shape and promote corporate sustainability. The contribution of their approach is to drill deeply within the organization to the individual within the company, whom they call the "Environmental Manager" (although companies have different titles for this post), charged with developing and implementing corporate sustainability policies.…”

“…We speculate ways that companies might reconceive their ethical duties and practices in the EM, CSR, and CPA areas to incorporate more elements of ecosystem rights and ecological preservation. Furthermore, we introduce two organizational practices that are featured in the following two articles in this same BEQ volume: (1) creating an active environmental manager position, who infuses environmental values and practices throughout the organization through his or her institutional work (Dahlmann & Grosvold, 2017); and (2) consciously constructing places within organizations for debate and dissent about sustainability, called the license to critique (Christensen, Morsing, & Thyssen, 2017). The practices advocated by these authors support, at least in part, an intrinsic value orientation and hence expand the ethical foundations of corporate sustainability management.…”