In search of the corporate citizen: The emerging discourse of corporate ecology

Abstract

Examinations of corporate discourse tend to dichotomize ethical stakeholder relationships and strategic business decisions, but when the ethical/economic conflict is cast in rhetorical terms, the apparent contradictions can be seen as a failure of traditional Western managerial discourse. Decision making within bureaucratic organizations has followed the traditionally rational, assertive forms of Western discourse, but management theorists increasingly urge corporations to adopt practices more appropriate for complex, adaptive, self-organizing communities. This emerging rhetorical form has practical utility in an adaptive, post-industrial "learning organization " but also allows a performance of organizational citizenship that integrates ethical and economic values in a discourse of corporate ecology.

Crossing Borders in Health Communication Research: Toward an Ecological Understanding of Context, Complexity, and Consequences in Community-Based Health Education in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands

“…More recently, organizational theorists have been translating these ideas to organizational settings, moving from a biological metaphor of systems and functions in organizations (Farace, Monge, & Russell, 1977;von Bertalanffy, 1968) to a less well ordered, more indeterminate view of organizational relations offered by an ecological approach (Cyphert & Saiia, 2004;Stacey, Griffen, & Shaw, 2000). Systems thinking and principles are also at the core of many approaches to theories of community development and social change that inform health information dissemination research.…”

“…Further, the boundaries between systems are understood as varying in their permeability but nonetheless as distinct boundaries (Farace et al, 1977;von Bertalanffy, 1968). Cyphert and Saiia (2004) suggest that "an ecological perspective understands the interrelationships between an organism and its environment to be so complex and so constitutive that the boundaries between one and the other begin to mingle" (p. 246). Thus, in an ecological approach to health information dissemination, the relationship between an individual, his or her social identity, and the community represents a kind of comingling and blurring of boundaries such that we become those with whom we interact and they become us, as we coconstruct our norms, values, and sensemaking processes.…”

“…The ecological perspective in organizations, in a somewhat less linear view of the relationship, posits that all constituents are embedded; that organisms exist in a living environment and change their environment through their activities (Cyphert & Saiia, 2004). Thus, the term embeddedness implies at a minimum a verticality in relations and, quite possibly, a hierarchy of relations within the environment.…”

“…In the ecological view, to survive in today's information-rich, complex environment, organizations must be able to gather and use information from a variety of sources and must value a wide range of information types, including emotional, personal, and intuitive knowledge. Further, a postmodern organization must learn as a holistic entity rather than depending on a centralized knowledge structure (Cyphert & Saiia, 2004). Thus, points of information collection and decision Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 09:01 19 November 2014 making must be widely distributed toward collective action developed from the insights of those closest to the problem.…”

Moral organizational creativity: Exploring ethical antecedents for a new construct

“…There is indeed a creativity imperative facing managers and organizations (Proctor, ). One of the greatest obstacles to creativity in organizations is a lack of total understanding of the organizational forces that facilitate creative solutions, which is essential to transform existing business models into ones that employ innovative and progressive ethical strategies (Cyphert & Saiia, ; Shrivastava & Statler, ). Indeed, 21st‐century organizations will need to “engage in new, more spontaneous and more innovative ways of managing” given the dramatic ways in which society is changing (Adler, , p. 486).…”