Greening Business Research, Theory, and Practice

About this book

Environmental protection has increasingly become a business issue at both the strategic and operational level for businesses of all sizes and across all continents. Greening Business is a comprehensive and highly contemporary analysis of the business/natural environment interface.

Supported by numerous examples of current environmental practices in industry and commerce, the book examines why, when, and how businesses have responded to the growing pressures from governments, citizens, and other stakeholders to improve on their environmental performance. Focusing on the firm as the primary unit of analysis, the book examines the major drivers of corporate ecological responsiveness and critically investigates the nature and range of business responses in both theory and practice. It offers a detailed analysis of the contested business case for corporate greening, using insights from current strategy and management theory, including the resource-based view of the firm, and discusses the ways in which a firm can incorporate its concern for environmental protection into its day-to-day operations and decisions and through its strategic posture. It concludes with a discussion of the notion of the ecologically sustainable enterprise.

Contents

SECTION ONE: MAPPING THE TERRITORY
1: Organizations and the Natural Environment: the Two Faces of Business

SECTION TWO: GREENING BUSINESS IN CONTEXT
2: The Emergence of Corporate Environmentalism
3: Government, Business, and the Natural Environment: Policy Instruments

SECTION THREE: THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL PERSPECTIVES
4: Why Firms Go Green: Drivers and Motivations
5: Models of Corporate Greening
6: Examining the Business Case for Corporate Greening
7: SMEs and the Environment

SECTION FOUR: GREENING BUSINESS IN PRACTICE
8: Green Strategies
9: Environmental Management Systems
10: Greening Business Functions

SECTION FIVE: CONCLUSION
11: Towards the Ecologically Sustainable Business Organization?

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Biography

Ian Worthington BA (Hons), PhD is Emeritus Professor of Corporate Sustainability in the Leicester Business School at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. In an academic career spanning over 30 years, Ian has taught on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses on business and management, specialising in the external context of business, greening the firm, and corporate social responsibility. His research has been published in a range of international, peer-reviewed journals including "Long Range Planning", the "Journal of Business Ethics", "Public Administration" and "Environment and Planning". Ian is co-author (with C. B. Britton) of the UK and Europe's best-selling book on the business environment, "The Business Environment", currently in its sixth edition, and he has acted as a consultant to a variety of private and public sector bodies, including the European Commission.