E-Book Overview
Environmental issues now loom large on the social, political, and business agenda. Over the past four decades, "corporate environmentalism" has emerged and been constantly redefined, from regulatory compliance to more recent management conceptions such as "pollution prevention", "total quality environmental management", "industrial ecology", "life cycle analysis", "environmental strategy", "environmental justice,"<span class='showMoreLessContentElement' style='display: none;'> and, most recently, "sustainable development." As a result, understanding the intersection of business.
E-Book Content
Retrospective, Perspective, and Prospective: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook on Business and the Natural Environment Oxford Handbooks Online Retrospective, Perspective, and Prospective: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook on Business and the Natural Environment Andrew J. Hoffman and Pratima Bansal The Oxford Handbook of Business and the Natural Environment Edited by Pratima Bansal and Andrew J. Hoffman Print Publication Date: Nov 2011 Subject: Business and Management, Business Policy and Strategy, Social Issues Online Publication Date: Jan 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199584451.003.0001 Abstract and Keywords This article addresses what is distinct about existing business and the natural environment (B&NE) research and provides the multiple directions in which the field is going. It first describes in broad terms the history of B&NE. It also introduces the central themes in the field as they exist today. Then, it reports what are found to be common and overarching themes and, therefore, fruitful areas of future research. The waves of corporate environmentalism recognize that corporate environmental issues were a problem necessitating regulatory controls, treat the environmental protection as a strategic concern, and concentrate on sustainability. A shift to a systems view of the B&NE relationship offers greater opportunities for optimizing social and environmental systems, but also greater complexities and challenges in managing them to predictable ends. B&NE research forces the kind of problem-based, temporally relevant research that critics and business practitioners demand from business schools. Keywords: business and the natural environment, corporate environmentalism, regulatory controls, environmental protection, sustainability THE twentieth century witnessed unprecedented economic growth and human prosperity. World population increased by a factor of four, the world economy increased by a factor of fourteen (Thomas 2002), and average life expectancy increased by almost two-thirds (World Resources Institute 1994). In the US alone, life expectancy rose from 47.3 to 77.3 between the years 1900 and 2002 (National Center For Health Statistics 2004). But, this progress has been accompanied by unintended and, at times, extreme damage to the natural environment on which it was based. Page 1 of 26 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: City, University of London; date: 28 July 2017 Retrospective, Perspective, and Prospective: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook on Business and the Natural Environment By 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a study commissioned by the United Nations and involving more than 1,360 experts worldwide, concluded that humans have changed the Earth's ecosystems in the second half of the twentieth century “more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history” (2005: 1). Of the twenty-four global ecosystem services t