Organization & Environment

Abstract

Welcome to the third recently reoriented issue of Organization & Environment! This issue is somewhat of a transitional one, in which we include, in the second half, a number of articles and book reviews that relate to the journal’s previous focus on environmental sociology, to complement several articles, in the first half, on our new theme of sustainability management. While one main motivation in providing this combination was to fulfill commitments of the previous editorial team to authors with whom they worked, we view this blend of perspectives as an opportunity to compare work in these two related fields and, for those readers so inclined, to connect them. In making this connection, conceptually, a number of similarities between the two fields can be identified. Obviously, both focus on human organizations and the natural environment, including the challenge and solutions of the interaction between these two phenomena, and both have been instrumental as fields in developing interesting sets of research. The most obvious difference between environmental sociology and sustainability management is that the former includes significant attention to movements, economies, sectors, communities, cultures, and society (as these are related to the natural environment), while sustainability management can include attention to those “levels” of human organization, but more often, its scope is the set of environmental (and social) aspects within and between organizations. So sustainability management researchers tend to focus on individual business, government, and nonprofit organizations; on collections of these in the form of associations, alliances, industries, strategic groups, and partnerships; and on entities within them (such as the governing board, top management, supervisors, employees, subsidiaries, departments, task forces, committees, and teams). Other comparisons between environmental sociology and sustainability management might be identified by researchers in either (or both) fields, such as those regarding political orientation, context versus process distinctions, and problem versus opportunity focus, but our goal in this issue is to consider excellent contributions in each of these two fields and to appreciate efforts to advance both. We lead off this issue with a thought-provoking sustainability management article by Maurizio Zollo, Carmelo Cennamo, and Kerstin Neumann, titled “Beyond What and Why: Understanding Evolution Toward Sustainable Enterprise Models.” After an extensive and intensive review of the relevant literature, they offer a model that incorporates but moves beyond the definitional and motivational questions of sustainability management to include the change and learning processes that they see as key to sustainability management initiatives. They develop a generic organizational adaptive capacity innovation-oriented enterprise model and then tie that to