Towards an Analytical Framework

Abstract

The field of environmental management has an urgent need for definition and theory building, as firmly established and debated in Chapter 2. In response to the greening trend in business, Gladwin (1993) pleaded for the application of organisational theory to clarify this phenomenon. He believed that ‘sociological theory pertaining to organisation holds the greatest promise for improving our understanding of how greening works’. To this end, he cited institutional theory as a probable source of ‘guidance on the why, how, and when of greening’. Westney (1993:54) supported the adoption of an institutionalisation paradigm for the study of MNC responses, in particular for examining the extent to which MNC behaviour is universally uniform (operating country independent) or locally variable (operating country dependent). Rothenberg and Maxwell (1992) employed institutional theory in their examination of the Volvo Group. In a reply to Mintzberg’s (1979:293) statement that popular business trends (in the present case, different manifestations of greening) exert a strong influence on the techniques of corporate management, Rothenberg and Maxwell offered reasons based on DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) work to account for this phenomenon.

The point of social contract thinking is not to dig up the historical causes of, say, the Sumerian or Egyptian kingdoms. It is, rather, to clarify the proper moral presuppositions of organisational existence. The strategy is to engage people in a thoughtexperiment that will utilise reason and intuition in a manner calculated to achieve moral insight. The point of applying social contract reasoning to business is to clarify the moral foundation of productive organisations, of which corporations happen to be one kind.

Donaldson 1989:47