Pioneering descriptions of corporate greening: Notes and doubts on the emerging discussion

Abstract

This article reviews the emerging discussion on corporate greening. The pioneering authors are found to have drawn on a number of perspectives in their descriptions of the greening process. Their views emphasise the choice of an environmental strategy, reform in management systems, organisational change, cultural change and institutional change. In spite of this conceptual diversity, the first accounts almost unanimously assume that greening will be, and should be, a topdown process starting from the top management and being implemented through formal measures. This article suggest that these assumptions should be relaxed and both empirical research and managerial practice should be receptive to other varieties of greening, too. In particular, informal and autonomous bottom-up processes may be very important in such a fundamental transition which greening may in some cases prove to be. This argument is based conceptually on an institutional view on the logics of managerial action, and empirically on studies in other fields of managerial work and on a case study of environmental management in a Finnish chemicals company.

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