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Abstract

This paper develops an organizational political economy perspective to examine the effects of organizational and political-legal arrangements on environmental pollution. We focus on the largest parent companies in the electrical energy industry because parent companies have ultimate decision-making authority over their polluting facilities, and this economic sector is responsible for a high proportion of environmental pollution. The paper includes an historical analysis of how neoliberal regulatory changes transformed the political embeddedness of firms and a quantitative analysis of the relationship between organizational and political-legal arrangements and environmental pollution. The analysis moves beyond the current focus on disproportionality among economic sectors by demonstrating that variation in organizational structure and other corporate characteristics within an economic sector are associated with disproportionally higher levels of environmental pollution. In addition, the findings provide policy makers with information that can be used to enact policies that target corporate characteristics associated with high pollution.