Making sense of greening and organizational change

Abstract

This paper focuses on the greening of organizations as a process. It offers an account of how the environment is enacted within an organization, and explores how the personal and social meanings of ‘the environment’ arise in the context of behaviour. The paper presents a case study of the introduction of environmental reporting or green accounting in a public hospital in Denmark, and highlights how hospital managers made sense of this new task and made green accounting perform in the context of their everyday work situation. In doing so, emphasis is given to the emotional aspects of greening, and to how this shapes different actions. Greening is viewed as a sense‐making process, in which the organizational members' individual and collective identity is gradually transformed. Based on case findings, the paper discusses how organizing for the environment cannot be separated from the emotional subtexts of the organizational members and the other currents of organizational life. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Navigating Sustainability Embeddedness in Management Decision-Making

“…[36,39,55,57]. We contribute to the persistent implementation gap by identifying and conceptualizing key antecedents of sustainability embeddedness in decision-making from which management can develop initiatives and programs.…”

“…By asking practitioners about the primary decisions made in their jobs, we sought to create retrospection, which was highly relevant to meaning construction. Our method also supported us to evaluate the implementation, operation, and management of sustainability embeddedness in decision-making [41,55,73].…”

“…We argue that the realization of sustainability in practice and subsequent improved decision-making for enhanced sustainability can only be achieved when the current situation of sustainability embeddedness in decision-making has been conceptualized [33,[55][56][57]. This requires in-depth involvement from practitioners and the necessary inclusion of subjective decision-making factors into interpretation such as ideology, values, norms, and context, due to their influence on an improved understanding of decision-making and strategy execution [6,37,44,50].…”

Sustainability in Healthcare: Combining Organizational and Architectural Levers

“…They can be implemented in several forms, such as financial rewards and recognition awards, and these can function as reinforcement to motivate and increase commitment to the environment. Moreover, feedback on energy and resource consumption can increase awareness about the use of resources and maintain the enthusiasm and interest often associated with project initiation and the early stages of implementation of an environmental programme [26,27,31].…”

“…Leaders must approach green innovation with a firm commitment to investing in and responding to local innovation teams and their recommendations related to effective environmental transformation [10]. Thus, a participatory and transformational leadership style has been found to be essential to motivate workers and increase their commitment to sustainability [10,23,27,41].…”