1 Introduction

Every field of inquiry goes through a life cycle; a new idea emerges, it develops into a growing body of literature and either continues to grow or enters into decline (Downs, 1972). A sure sign of the successful growth of a field is an effort to institutionalize its history, categorize its accomplishments and project its future directions. The field of Business and the Natural Environment (B&NE) has reached that stage. After expanding in the early 1990s as a distinct field of empirical inquiry, it has grown to include contributions from the full gamut of business disciplines. By 2010, the field had matured and interest (as measured by article counts and society membership) had reached a plateau. Looking forward, there are new issues and new topics that the field will embrace as it progresses in the coming decades.

This book provides a brief overview of the trajectories of the field’s development, offering a structure for understanding its emergence and growth, the multiple facets that make up its present state and a glimpse into the future of where it may be going. Along the way, we will provide a compendium of its important works to help situate the interested reader in the landscape of the field. One important element of this work is its topical relevance; issues of environmental protection – and more recently sustainability – are critically important in today’s worlds of business, policy and public understanding. Scholars who choose to enter this domain have much to offer of societal value.

The B&NE field emerged as a response to calls over the last 40 years for the corporate sector to minimize resource use, reduce pollution and prevent damage to the environment. Despite some progress, many of these problems continue to persist, and new and grave problems have surfaced. These problems include climate change, water scarcity, toxic waste, habitat destruction, species extinction and many other issues that are directly related to the ways our market systems provide society with food, buildings, energy, transport, mobility, clothing, synthetic chemicals and other material aspects of our modern culture. In each of these domains business is heavily implicated, both as part of the problem and as part of the solution. B&NE scholars have sought to uncover the deeper elements of what drives companies to address these issues, the organizational and technical structures they develop to respond to them, and the resultant innovations that emerge to transform organizational and market systems.

Although a few authors started addressing the environmental problems associated with corporate production and consumption patterns as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, it was not until the mid-1990s that B&NE scholars began to vigorously engage in an analysis of business responses to environmental concerns. Some of this early work emerged in the broader and older field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Aguilera et al., 2007; Carroll, 1979; Matten and Crane, 2005; Matten and Moon, 2008). But given that environmental pollution and protection lent itself more readily to clear and distinct quantification, regulation and theorization, the B&NE field found itself able to connect to existing paradigms of shareholder capitalism and regulatory control, and therefore carve itself out as a separate (but related) domain.

While some continue to use the notions of B&NE and CSR interchangeably, others make the clear distinction between the two with CSR placing more emphasis on the philanthropic, social and less quantifiable aspects of business practice (e.g. anti-corruption, philanthropy to support local endeavors, etc.) and B&NE denoting quantitative damages to the natural environment (e.g. CO₂ emissions, toxic discharges, waste, water and energy use, etc.). Some associate CSR more with multi-national corporations (MNCs) than small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs), but there is a growing interest in how SMEs are grappling with these issues (Ángel del Brio and Junquera, 2003; Hilary, 2004; Petts et al., 1999). Some scholars have also entered this domain through the area of family business (Sharma, 2004). Others emphasize the difference between the US and European approaches to CSR. According to Matten and Moon (2008), CSR in the US is more likely to be the result of corporate discretion (which they label “explicit CSR”), whereas CSR in European corporations seeks to address stakeholder issues and exhibit proper obligations in keeping with societal expectations (“implicit CSR”). This transatlantic difference is mainly attributed to differences in the institutional framework and underlying societal norms, values and expectations (Matten and Moon, 2008).

Some bemoan the lack of a precise definition for both CSR and B&NE, but in seeking strict, consistent definitions there is a risk of “overlooking” the contested nature of these issues (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998) and, more importantly, glossing over the complexities, uncertainties and ambiguities that both domains entail. There is, however, an equal danger that too much interpretive flexibility may blind scholars (in the eyes of some, such as Gladwin, 2012) to the challenges of changing corporate behavior and to the complex contingencies of “success” (less environmentally damaging behavior while increasing profits). Indeed, as ecological challenges continue to grow (despite more than 40 years of efforts to redress them), both CSR and B&NE will continue to be of great importance, even as strict definitions remain difficult to uphold. Moreover, the entanglement of the social and environmental domains is captured in the extant conceptions of corporate sustainability (Ehrenfeld, 2008; Elkington, 1999) and its associated rubric of the triple bottom line that accounts for a company’s environmental, social and economic performance. Nevertheless, B&NE has remained a distinct and autonomous field which has passed through and encompassed multiple iterations: empirically, theoretically, conceptually and geographically.

Empirically, the focus has considered media-based issues of water, air and land based pollutants in a variety of different industries, and moved from end of pipe solutions to clean technologies, the introduction of management system tools (ISO, EMAS etc.), the greening of the supply chains and others issues.

Theoretically, scholars have approached these issues through the lenses of existing business disciplines regarding organizational behavior, corporate strategy, marketing, operations, accounting and finance, and augmented these perspectives with further insights from economics, sociology, psychology and political science. In a few rare instances, some have attempted to link to the natural sciences (Starik, 1995; Whiteman, Walker and Perego, 2013). It is a field characterized by the use of multiple interpretive frameworks.

Conceptually, the relationship between business and the natural environment has been characterized in multiple ways. Some characterize the phenomena of environmental management as a linear evolution of stages in the corporate development process, with companies moving up the ladder of environmentalism (Hoffman and Ehrenfeld, 1998; 2015; Hunt and Auster, 1990). Some problematize this phenomena as an ongoing battle waged among competing interests and social movements, with its requisite ebbs and flows. Some consider environmental management as a means for continual internalization of environmental externalities, with policies playing a critical role in either curbing environmental insults through coercive command and control policies or incentivizing better corporate behavior through market-based policies. In both cases, the focus is on monetizing environmental insults. Some see a darker side to corporate environmentalism as power-plays, green-washing and regulatory capture (Lyon and Maxwell, 2011). And finally, some see corporations as the solution to environmental problems as they innovatively respond to evolving markets and changing institutional and political environments (Hoffman, 2001a).

Geographically, the B&NE field is a multi-national field, growing largely in North America and Europe. More recently, Asian and Australasian scholars have entered the field, adding important insights on environmental issues associated with their growing industrial base. While B&NE research in North America and Europe emerged around the same time and grew in unison, there are differences with regard to the topics addressed and the theoretical and methodological approaches used. North American scholarship has tended to emphasize the theoretical focus of the disciplinary management journals and directed its inquiry at academic colleagues in those disciplinary fields. European scholarship, on the other hand, has tended to draw upon (newer) social theories such as critical management theory, practice theory and actor-network theory. It has a stronger emphasis on qualitative studies and has been published more in specialized journals. Engaging with audiences within the corporate community is the aim of much research across the continents (though, many would argue not enough). Today, the North American, European, Asian and Australiasian fields are finding more interconnections as the journals, conferences and norms of doctoral training and academic publishing begin to merge. Such a merging of these research traditions serves to further institutionalize the field, normalize its scope, expand its volume and create a rich foundation of literature upon which to build future inquiry. This work has been increasingly published in mainstream “A” journals but also continues to flourish within specialized journals that allow deviation from the strict norms of theoretical orthodoxy.

In short, the field of B&NE is a wide-ranging one that has grown to now include various empirical foci, theoretical disciplines, conceptualized models and geographic traditions. Each component offers a different piece of the composite whole for understanding how and why environmental issues impact and are impacted by the corporate system. More importantly, this literature has now reached a stage where it has sufficient critical mass and intellectual rigor that it has gained the legitimacy of not only fitting within, but also augmenting and improving, the existing paradigms of academic literature. At the same time, the field has maintained some of its more provocative roots by honoring on-going critical analyses that challenge those existing paradigms (Bansal and Gao, 2006; Bansal and Hoffman, 2012; Georg and Hoffman, 2013; Gladwin, 1993; Shrivastava, 1994; Kallio and Nordberg, 2006).

But this growing legitimacy raises questions about the present state of the field and its future trajectory. In light of its history, B&NE research can hardly be said to represent one stream of discussion, but what are the streams and sub-streams? Are the debates and discussions that make up the B&NE domain best represented as one large interconnected discourse, many individual and isolated conversations, or a combination in which some articles bridge disciplines? And even further, how does this domain of scholarship fit with the rest of the work within the management literature? Is B&NE research a field of study that informs other management domains or is it an isolated domain onto itself? And finally, how do we make sense of the fact the corpus of B&NE research is not leading to an alleviation of the environmental problems that motivate it? Issues of climate change, water scarcity, species extinction and other issues continue to worsen (Ehrenfeld and Hoffman, 2013; Rockström et al., 2009). In short, how do we characterize the purpose and success of the B&NE research domain as a composite whole?

Answering these questions is one goal of this research monograph. We also hope to offer a view of the field that may allow B&NE scholars to understand the overall landscape as well as its various contours. At the same time, we hope to stimulate reflection and debate over the state of the field of B&NE scholarship and where it might or should be going. To that end, we do not offer the definitive final word, but rather a perspective and commentary upon which we hope others will build. At this time in the history of B&NE research, we have an opportunity to explore the ways in which corporate practice has been studied and theorized as a backdrop for thinking about renewed ways in which it could be studied and amended. It is important for the training of new scholars who enter the domain to periodically take stock of where senior scholars have laid the field’s foundations. (We refer to “senior” scholars with some amusement; as B&NE is in fact a relatively new field, where the senior members within it are relatively young – at least in our eyes! – compared to what we traditionally consider to be more mature and established fields.) But again, a question that this point raises is whether B&NE being characterized as a “young” field is due to a lack of a shared (specialized) conceptual frameworks and standardized research methods or a vibrancy that comes from addressing some of society’s grand challenges and allows it to avoid the inertia of a long historical legacy. Finally, it is important that this review of B&NE research remain closely linked to the natural worlds as studied by the natural sciences so as to maintain its focus on the state the latter by studying advances in the former. The fraying of this linkage will be discussed in more depth in chapter 4.

The remainder of this book comprises three chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 2 offers a history of publications during the development of the field in 1990s and 2000s; presenting a statistical synopsis of when papers have been published, where and with what focus, as well as a network analysis map to depict the form and flow of its multiple conversations. Chapter 3 highlights the main conversations taking place in the field today, emphasizing how the various conversations cluster and interconnect and highlighting the major papers that inform those discussions. Chapter 4 considers the future of the field, particularly as it relates to the emerging awareness that we and entering a new reality which geo-scientists call the Anthropocene. Viewed from this perspective, much of the research that B&NE scholars produce may have limited bearing on the worsening state of the environment. Chapter 5 offers some concluding remarks for the reader’s consideration as they ponder the state of the B&NE field. These chapters provide the basic groundwork for understanding the structure, nature, history and trajectory of the B&NE field, one that will be entertaining for the experienced scholars who have lived it with us, and informative for the novice scholar who wishes to take the challenge of continuing the field into the future.