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| Academy of Management Review-00-6328 |
By:
Rakesh Toparticle3 |
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We start our discussion with an analysis of the idea of ecocentric management. Next, we revise the contrast between ecocentric and nonecocentric management. We suggest that to understand ecocentric management one needs to distinguish it from three other paradigms: the pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial ones.
We further add that Shrivastava’s formulation may be better qualified as post-industrial (or, at best, as ecocentric with an anthropocentric bias; Sutter, 2001) rather than as corresponding to a new paradigm that puts the environment/nature at the core of organizational thinking. We thus contribute to the reanalysis of a pioneering concept in the organization theory literature, one that once put the environment at the heart of organization theorizing.
The notion of ecocentric management was described by Stead and Stead (1996, p. 181) as ‘a very good place to begin’ the analysis of the relationship between organizations and the natural environment. In this sense, we recover the concept to take stock and to make sense of the evolution of the relationship between organizations and the natural environment as well as of the challenges ahead.
We therefore present the possible alternative contours of ecocentricity, and conclude with a brief discussion of the promises and obstacles to this nature-centric paradigm.
In an article published in 1995 in the Academy of Management Review, Paul Shrivastava discussed the need to incorporate the natural environment into organizational theory. He proposed the adoption of what was labeled ‘ecocentric management, [. . .] a vision of ecologically sustainable organization–environment relations’ (p. 127). This was ‘a tentative, provisional, and incomplete’ (p. 127) effort to move the organization forward to a new understanding of its relationship with the natural environment:
Organizations in the ecocentric paradigm are appropriately scaled, provide meaningful work, have decentralized participative decision making, have low earning differentials among employees, and have non-hierarchical structures. They establish harmonious relationships between their natural and social environments. They seek to systematically renew natural resources and to minimize waste and pollution (Shrivastava, 1995, p. 130).
This new ecocentric management paradigm was justified by the increasing risks confronting human societies and resulting from a previous paradigm – anthropocentric in the sense of taking nature and the planet as ‘external’ dimensions, to be freely handled for human needs and wants (for a comparison between anthropocentric and ecocentric ethics, see, e.g., Hoffman and Sandelands, 2005; Kortenkamp and Moore, 2001). These risks include nuclear catastrophes, natural disasters precipitated by human intervention, pollution, soil degradation and the depletion and extinction of species, among others.
About the Author:
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