Institutional theory and the natural environment: Building research through tensions and paradox

The focus of institutional theory is directed towards an understanding of situations such as those depicted in Rachel Carson's quote above – situations where context is strong and binding, yet subtly experienced; where agency is often diffuse, embodied in an arrangement or system of actors rather than in an individual; and where action and inaction both matter, if in often unpredictable ways. One area in which these phenomena are notably pronounced is research in the area of the interaction between institutional systems and the workings of the natural environment; the ways in which human societies both understand their interface with that environment, and the ways in which the actions of one impact the other. In this chapter, we offer an overview of that domain of research, tracing the evolution of efforts at combining the two since its beginnings in the early 1990s, when the Greening of Industry Network initiated its environmental management research collection (1989), the Organizations and the Natural Environment special interest group of the Academy of Management was formed (1994) and the seminal Special Issue on environmental management was published in the Academy of Management Review (1995).