Environmental governance implies creation of novel interdependencies among actors and actions, and this innovation and diversity presents challenges. One of these challenges is the maintenance of legitimacy. To understand processes of legitimation at the level of individual organizations and at the level of the larger assemblages represented by governance arrangements, we develop a conceptual framework that analyzes accountability relationships. Within this framework, we use artifacts of accountability, material representations of accountability relationships, to understand the creation, maintenance, and erosion of legitimacy. We study the creation and administration of a multifunctional forested landscape in New Hampshire, USA. Empirical assessment of the varied institutional logics that structure and contribute to legitimacy in this material and organizational landscape allows us to advance understanding of persistence, change, and failure of environmental governance arrangements.
Knowledge spillovers play a potentially important role for innovation and competitive dynamics in mass-produced environmental technologies. Currently, however, we lack research that studies knowledge spillovers in such technologies at the firm level. To address this shortcoming, in this article we investigate the drivers of technological innovation in the solar photovoltaic industry. We find clear evidence for the existence of interfirm knowledge spillovers and show that besides investments in R&D, investments in manufacturing equipment have served as a channel of knowledge absorption. Our findings shed new light on the narrative linking environmental innovation and competitive advantage. Moreover, by pointing to the role of process technology as a means of assimilating and exploiting external knowledge, we highlight an important but frequently neglected channel of absorptive capacity.
Drawing on complementary theoretical perspectives, we investigate whether and to what extent family-influenced firms differ from their nonfamily counterparts in terms of the relationship between managerial attention to natural environmental issues and concomitant environmental actions. Using data from letters to shareholders and the KLD database, we investigate 97 firms in five polluting industries. Our findings indicate that family firms positively moderate the relationship between top managers’ attention to natural environmental issues and proactive environmental action. Conversely, nonfamily firms demonstrate less proactive environmental action as their attention to environmental issues increases, suggesting greenwashing. We argue that attention and action behaviors in family firms are intimately connected with their desire to preserve socioemotional wealth and indicate a lower propensity to greenwash, whereas nonfamily firms’ short-term financial objectives may motivate a different response pattern.
This article contributes to the literature on corporate sustainability management by investigating a corporate-led consumer "behaviour change" initiative designed to promote sustainable consumption. This is done through an in-depth longitudinal case study of Procter & Gamble’s low-temperature laundry initiative as it unfolded over a 10-year period to become an industry-wide campaign with broad societal acceptance and institutional support by 2013. The analysis is guided by insights from three prominent organizational theories used in the study of corporate sustainability (stakeholder theory, institutional theory, and the resource-based view of the firm). The case demonstrates that a successful behaviour change initiative involves far more than providing information or incentive for consumers, entailing changes in regulation, technology, organizational identity, mental models, and legitimacy. Procter & Gamble’s management strategy can be viewed as an emergent and open-ended innovation journey that took time, required resources, and involved adjustments in goals as mental models evolved.
The objective of this article is to explore how decision makers in small- and medium-sized enterprises explain their lack of commitment to sustainability through various justifications. These justifications are intended to rationalize and legitimize, through socially acceptable arguments, the absence of substantial actions in this area. A case study based on 33 interviews in nine Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprises showed that managers rationalize their lack of commitment to sustainability in several different ways. These can be grouped into three main types of justifications: prioritization of economic survival, looking for a scapegoat, and denial and minimization (denial of negative impacts, minimization of sustainability issues, self-proclaimed sustainability). The study contributes to bridge the gap between the literatures on neutralization theory, resistance to institutional pressures, and corporate unsustainability. It also sheds further light on the reasons underlying the lack of commitment to sustainable development and how managers justify this to themselves and others.
Sustainable entrepreneurs are considered to play a crucial role in fostering sustainable development. However, transitions in sociotechnical systems, such as a transition to low-carbon energy solutions, are unlikely to succeed without the coordination with regional political actions, particularly in sectors characterized by path dependency and lock-ins. Based on an empirical analysis of the interplay between firms and public authorities when opening new energy niche markets through Sustainable Energy Action Plans, this article explores the role of sustainable entrepreneurs. We investigate the different levels of engagement with public authorities in co-evolutionary processes toward sustainable development. From this empirical research, four types of co-evolutionist sustainable entrepreneur are derived—hero, visionary, bandwagoner, and explorer. These correspond to the different degrees of interaction with public authorities and system level of action, and extend the definition of the sustainable entrepreneur. The related academic and managerial implications contribute to the current debate on sustainable entrepreneurship.
Scholars and managers have raised the question of how to encourage employees to perform discretionary pro-environmental behaviors at work, termed organizational citizenship behaviors toward the environment (OCB-Es). This study examined how rationales for organizational sustainability relate to employees’ OCB-Es. We considered two rationales—eco-centric and organization-centric—and two sources—employees’ rationales and their perceptions of their employers’ rationales. Results from 489 working adults across a variety of organizations and occupations revealed that both eco-centric and organization-centric rationales at both individual and perceived organizational levels related to employees’ OCB-Es. Furthermore, we found interactive effects, such that employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ rationales were more important than their own rationales in determining OCB-Es. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of the complex and interrelated factors motivating employees to perform voluntary sustainability behaviors in organizations. In addition, our results are valuable for managers looking to increase employee sustainability behaviors.
This article aims to encourage research into how organizations can manage their resilience in response to adverse conditions stemming from the natural environment (ecological adversity). While firms may have a general ability to cope with unfavorable operating environments, adaptation to ecological adversity in particular may actually face serious limitations. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from resilience theory in socioecology, this article develops several lines of inquiry. First, we identify the mechanisms by which organizational resilience may fluctuate as firms adapt to changing levels of ecological adversity. Second, we suggest that the existing conceptualization of organizational resilience could be expanded to include transformative change, which may allow firms to mitigate the operational impacts of reaching adaptation limits. Finally, we consider the resilience implications of the interdependency between firms and the broader ecosystems in which they operate. We conclude with potential avenues for future research in this area.
Commons are resources shared by a group of people, and are studied using the commons dilemma paradigm. Despite Hardin’s prediction that the only sustainable management options are government regulation or private ownership, sustainable commons management has been observed with unregulated groups; however, global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans seem to conform to the prediction of "tragedy" because self-interests among users lead to degradation of the commons through overuse. The present study examined whether the factors of commons type (consumption or waste disposal) and cost (money or time) influence individual self-constraint in harvesting/polluting decisions to prolong the longevity of the shared resource, in the absence of social communication. Results indicate an interaction of the two factors: Individual self-constraint was greatest with the combination of disposal commons and time cost. These findings suggest that creative strategies to manage global commons may be possible, at least for waste-disposal commons.
Risk communication is important for a sustainable management of natural resources. Even though risk management is ideally ongoing, studies of long-term risk communication from the perspective of the communicator are lacking. This case study examined the preparation and implementation of forest risk communication in Sweden. Interviews were conducted with advisors at the Swedish Forest Agency, responsible for providing information to forest owners and professional foresters dealing with risks damaging the forest (e.g., storms and forest management damaging ecological values). The communicator’s perspective was analyzed based on a conceptual framework describing risk communication by means of the components: within-communicator, relational, and content. Potential drivers of the preparation and implementation of risk communication in this context, intersecting the three components, included the policy and regulatory framework, the management of the agency, the location of the agency, and the balancing of different interests.
This study’s goal was to analyze the contents of the S&P 500 companies’ mission, vision, and values statements to measure the extent to which they reflect the concept of sustainability. Data were collected from public domains (reports and websites) between April and June, 2013. Using inductive methods, we assessed corporations to reflect sustainability when their stated goal was not only to generate profits but also to care about people and the planet. The theme "generating the profit" emerged in 69.2% of the companies, while other themes of "caring for the people" and "safeguarding the planet" appeared respectively in 34.0% and 14.8% of the companies. About 12.0% of the companies had the triple bottom line (profit, people, and planet themes) in their strategic documents. Logistic regressions showed a sectoral difference in the emergence of profit, people, and planet themes. These findings are expected to instigate a healthy debate on sustainability.
A central claim within the sustainable development literature is that realizing sustainable outcomes requires a move away from a conceptualization of the environment as a separate, bounded, independently given entity. In this article, the conceptualization of the environment within best-selling strategy textbooks in the United Kingdom and Australia in 2011 is reviewed. The article focuses on strategy textbooks as it is argued that corporate strategists are key actors in the realization of sustainable outcomes, and that the constructs those individuals may learn from texts are potentially key to the realization of sustainable outcomes. The findings show that the constructs in the textbooks offer a sclerotic, dehumanized view of the environment that is partitioned into external and internal categories by an organizational boundary—a limitation, it is argued, that will not foster sustainable outcomes.
Although public agencies must mutually coordinate climate policy and other complex environmental issues, the extent and relative importance of informal networks and different dimensions of trust to the process remains underresearched. Addressing this, we conducted surveys and interviews with civil servants from numerous agencies and three levels of government working on climate change–related policy in the state of New York. We examined the effect of two network properties on mutual learning on climate change–related issues: the extent to which interagency communication takes places through formal and informal channels, and the distribution of two dimensions of trust ("fair play" and "relational comfort") across the network. Our analysis revealed that formal communication among staff at different agencies was utilized more often than informal and that interagency relationships were more characterized by a feeling of "fair play" than by "relational comfort," yet informal communication and Relational Comfort were the most important in facilitating interagency collaboration.
We discuss an international immersion research experience conducted by an interdisciplinary team of business and environmental engineering students and faculty in Tanzania. Using this experience as "data," we bring out methodological and substantive issues in studying the intersection of poverty and the environment. The approach we describe is bottom-up, beginning with micro-level details of life circumstances. Such micro-level details are often the most challenging to learn and the most neglected in terms of informing practice. Our work speaks to a number of issues such as organizing a short research immersion for effectiveness and efficiency, covering different units of analysis in terms of individuals, households, communities, village-level leadership, and the outside ecosystem of organizations using a bottom-up approach, and combining natural science analytical testing with social science to focus on the substantive domains of environments in subsistence contexts.
In India, a change in the consumption pattern has been observed among the industrial energy consumer since the past few years as they are shifting towards renewable energy sources for fulfilling their energy requirement. This study has used the theory of customer value to determine factors supporting development of industrial consumers’ relationship with green energy. Under the current scenario of climate change, it has become inevitable to maintain customers’ loyalty towards green energy. Perceived switching cost is a vital strategic tool for increasing customer loyalty towards a product or service. Therefore, in this study, the effect of various dimensions of customer value on perceived switching cost is examined in an industrial green energy market setting. Structural equation modelling technique is used to analyse data collected from 126 organisations by questionnaire survey. The results show that conditional value of green energy is having highest impact on perceived switching cost followed by functional value, social value, and emotional value.
The relevance of business models for corporate performance in general and corporate sustainability in particular has been widely acknowledged in the literature while sustainable entrepreneurship research has started to explore contributions to the sustainability transformation of markets and society. Particularities of the business models of sustainable niche market pioneers have been identified in earlier research, but little is known about the dynamic role of business models for sustainable entrepreneurship processes aiming at upscaling ecologically and socially beneficial niche models or sustainability upgrading of conventional mass market players. Informed by evolutionary economics, we develop a theoretical framework to analyze co-evolutionary business model development for sustainable niche pioneers and conventional mass market players aiming at the sustainability transformation of markets. Core evolutionary processes of business model variation, selection and retention, and evolutionary pathways are identified to support structured analyses of the dynamics between business model innovation and sustainability transformation of markets.
This study explores how employees in a Finnish financial company use rhetorical strategies to accept or reject corporate environmentalism. It is based on a qualitative study in which face-to-face interviews were conducted among 30 employees. The study shows how employees rejected corporate environmentalism by dissociating their employer from polluters or by dissociating environmental values from other values in the financial business. It also shows how they accepted corporate environmentalism by associating it with other business virtues and by associating the employer with polluters. The study identifies rhetorical strategies as a means for employees to construct an understanding of corporate environmentalism, and of whether or not it is a part of their organization’s responsibilities. The results highlight a need to manage corporate environmentalism processes so that the focus is on finding diverse meanings instead of on promoting a single, organization-wide meaning for corporate environmentalism in a top-down manner.
In response to recent calls for more micro-foundation research in corporate social responsibility, this article approaches environmental sustainability from an organizational behavior/human resource perspective. Specifically, this article refines the concept of the environmental workplace behaviors (EWBs), defined here as "work behaviors directed toward the protection or improvement of the natural environment, which may or may not generate value for the organization; these behaviors may be performed by employees situated at any organizational level." EWBs include organization citizenship behaviors for the environment (OCBEs), environmental in-role behaviors (EIRBs), and environmental counterproductive workplace behaviors (ECWBs). Furthermore, the article distinguishes between low-intensity and high-intensity EWBs and discusses the importance of constructs such as trust and power for green employee engagement in EWBs. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and practice in the area of environmental behaviors in organizations.
Natural disasters challenge a community’s resilience. Prior community resilience research has focused on the responses of public entities, such as emergency services and government agencies. However, for-profit firms are also engaged in responding to natural disasters. This article explores two aspects of how firms participate in building community resilience to natural disasters: First, the article synthesizes research on business continuity management, corporate philanthropy, and emerging evidence that firms engage in the business of disaster response into a coherent typology of for-profit firm responses to natural disasters. Second, the article draws on stakeholder theory to distinguish between firms adopting firm-centric postures (focused inwardly on firm outcomes) versus firms adopting community-centric postures (focused outwardly on stakeholders), with respect to responding to natural disasters. We theorize relationships between firm- versus community-centric postures and different community resilience outcomes. The article concludes by discussing contributions to stakeholder theory and outlines future research directions.
In the European context, the proliferation of private agrienvironmental certifications leads many farmers to become subject to increasing controls by either independent, private third-party certifying bodies or public authorities. The aim of this study is thus to explore the potential benefits of and the organizational limits to the use of combined audits when farmers are involved in multiple private certifications. Our analysis especially emphasizes the role of time structuring during the audit process, the transition from checklist toward risk-based auditing and the role of knowledge artefacts for the reliability of the audit process and the certification. Our study offers insights on the possible transformative role of auditing policies in the governance of agrienvironmental certified schemes toward more sustainability in agriculture.
Environmental management has become a fundamental concern for organizations, customers, and citizens, yet there are few environmental management metrics that guide toward environmental excellence. This research presents a detailed qualitative model of the evolution of environmental management of a firm through the definition of maturity stages and causal influences. The model provides a technique for assessing maturity stages as well as steps that can assist or negate their ecological advancement. The causal-based classification helps companies to understand the need for nontechnical elements in the process, such as top management commitment. This article also contributes to the literature on integrative multimethod research, as it brings together several approaches to environmental management.
This article presents a case study examining the problems and possibilities of performance management in a wind-farm company. Drawing on Ferreira and Otley’s recently developed performance management systems (PMSs) framework, the study demonstrates how the framework facilitates in-depth, holistic, and critical evaluations of existing PMSs, and how these evaluations can drive the development of revised PMSs that balance economic, social, and environmental goals. This integrated focus on PMS evaluation and design is unique as earlier work seeking to develop systems to promote and measure sustainable performance tends to establish them in isolation from informed evaluations of existing systems. Drawing on the case analysis, the article proposes a form of "sustainable balanced scorecard" to enable a company to streamline its management decision making. It also offers guidance for companies on the development of PMSs that can contribute to their survival and growth in a wind energy sector characterized by increasing competition.
In a developing country context, this study explores environmental awareness, stakeholder influence strategies, and pollution prevention roles among 11 local, civil society groups (e.g., environmental nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] is one grouping; media and press is another grouping). A theoretical framework that builds on the social movement literature and is more inclusive of a developing country context is offered. In essence, awareness-raising is also considered a stakeholder influence strategy. Based on surveys conducted in Chittagong, Bangladesh, the results of this empirical study show that 10 of the 11 groups were environmentally aware; however, only the environmental NGOs were willing to influence the other groups. The environmental NGOs were actively raising awareness, but they were not directly influencing firms or the federal government on pollution prevention. These findings challenge the generalization of current stakeholder influence theory to a developing country context and raise concerns about the capacity of local civil society to encourage pollution prevention.
The potential negative environmental consequences of the activities of international firms has been scrutinized. In response to these pressures, international firms have started to disclose (voluntarily or not) environmental information in order to increase transparency and ensure legitimacy. While several factors have been pointed out as the drivers of such disclosing behavior, the role of industrial regulation has remained underesearched. To better understand this challenge, we rely on a sample of 1,150 international firms (top vs. nontop) worldwide from regulated and unregulated sectors. Our results suggest that unregulated firms disclose—to cope with higher stakeholders pressures—more environmental information than firms operating in regulated environments. Additionally, a firm’s international position positively influences its environmental disclosure, but it does negatively and partially moderate the relationship between industrial regulation of the sector in which the firm operates and such firm’s environmental disclosure. Our findings may also entail interesting contributions both for practitioners and scholars.
This essay examines links, similarities, and dissimilarities between stakeholder theory and sustainability management. Based on the analysis a conceptual framework is developed to increase the applicability and the application of stakeholder theory in sustainability management. Concluding from the analysis, we identify three challenges of managing stakeholder relationships for sustainability: strengthening the particular sustainability interests of stakeholders, creating mutual sustainability interests based on these particular interest, and empowering stakeholders to act as intermediaries for nature and sustainable development. To address these challenges three interrelated mechanisms are suggested: education, regulation, and sustainability-based value creation for stakeholders.
We analyze the suitability of cross-sector partnerships as an effective mechanism for private environmental governance. By focusing on the interaction between firms within cross-sector partnerships, we analyze how competition between firms affects partnership effectiveness. Marrying insights from the private governance literature with institutional theory and the resource-based view, we identify under which conditions firm-level competition for legitimacy and capabilities, respectively, undermines or enhances effectiveness of cross-sector partnerships to address environmental issues. In doing so, our argument develops the various factors that moderate the relationship between competition and effectiveness for different types of partnerships. We contend that the effectiveness of cross-sector partnerships for governing global environmental issues depends considerably on whether competitive forces at the firm level are aligned with the collective benefits of partnerships. We discuss the consequences for designing effective cross-sector partnerships as well as the implications of a firm perspective on private governance.
Europeanization research dealing with the environmental transition in Eastern Europe has focused on the roles of state actors in adopting European regulations. Less well understood are the framings and roles of public administration actors when European Union regulations do not prescribe specific institutional changes. This article offers a micro perspective on the framings and roles of such actors in several cases of brownfield regeneration. Actors can play a proactive role, thereby fostering change, or they can play a moderately active or a passive role. We identify three moments—defining brownfield problems, mobilizing networks, and leading by example—which together define an entrepreneurial path. Along this path, actors can evolve from passivity toward entrepreneurship, but stasis and regression are also possible. Using qualitative data from the project TIMBRE (Tailored Improvement of Brownfield Regeneration in Europe), we illustrate different moments along this path for public sector actors in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania.
This literature review article aims to bring a better understanding to the field of corporate sustainability (CS) as studied by management scholars. The first part of this review quantifies the amount of research devoted to CS and related topics such as corporate social responsibility, corporate social performance, environmental strategies and environmental performance from 1995 through 2013. The authors then summarize the different definitions, organizational theories, and measures that have been adopted by management scholars working in the CS field in both academic and practitioner management journals. The results show that the CS field is still evolving and different approaches to define, theorize, and measure CS have been used. Differences are also found between the literature that targets scholars versus the one targeting practitioners. The authors also provide a set of recommendations on how to advance the CS field.
Internationally, there is a growing call to embrace more participatory and democratic approaches to environmental science and policy to improve sustainability outcomes. This presents a particular challenge in Westminster-based systems of government, where participatory and inclusive structures for policy making are considered inherently difficult due, in part, to the high concentration of power in the executive and political elite. To better understand this challenge, we conducted exploratory research into the science–policy experiences of former environment ministers (politicians) and senior bureaucrats who have held executive roles in provincial/ state and federal governments across Canada and Australia and the national governments of New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Our results suggest that government organizations could further strengthen a culture of policy-relevant research and evidence-based policy on environment issues by fostering more decentralized approaches to policy and more democratic approaches to scientific knowledge production that better accounts for the complexity of environmental decision making.
As part of the European Union’s (EU) renewable energy and climate targets and its drive for sustainability, energy efficiency, and environmental protection, various elements of the defense sector in Europe are undertaking their own green initiatives. This is particularly important as the defense sector is one of the biggest public consumers of energy in the EU. This article asks to what extent, how, and why elements of the defense sector in Europe have engaged in greening. By examining four categories in a relevant typology of greening—ceremonial greening, holistic greening, regulatory greening, and competitive greening—this article argues that the defense sector in Europe is far from being a holistic green actor. Rather, Europe’s militaries, defense institutions, and defense firms exhibit a strong sense of self-interest in greening—embodied in defense market competition and regulation—and tend toward delegating green innovation to the market within an increasingly regulated context.
In this article, we strive to contribute to the ongoing shift in the sustainability debate from its historical focus on definitional ("what") and motivational ("why") questions to the understanding of change and learning process questions ("how") connected to the efforts some firms are making to evolve toward "sustainable enterprise" models. A conceptual framework to study these evolutionary processes is thus developed, and the complexities and research design trade-offs facing the related empirical inquiry highlighted. The main message advanced herein is that shifting the focus of analysis to the level of the initiatives undertaken to change the various elements in the enterprise model could prove the best way to frame the conceptual and empirical challenge before us. In a way, to make progress on the "what," research should focus on the "how."
This article argues that direct ecological impact needs to be incorporated into research on organizations and the natural environment, as complementary to conceptualizations of ecological impact as a social construction. Building on work in analytical sociology, it proposes to study socio-ecological mechanisms and thus enhance the understanding of processes of organizing within dynamic ecosystems. Three categories of socio-ecological mechanisms are introduced and illustrated with examples. The article concludes with reflections on the expected increase of direct ecological impact on organizations.
Created as a market-based instrument to deter tropical deforestation, the certification program of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has experienced tremendous growth over the past two decades. We argue that using a comprehensive conceptual framework is needed to assess the successes and limitations of FSC certification. We introduce a supply chain strategy framework to address three questions: (a) What are the requisite supply chain conditions for certification programs to be successful? (b) How well does the tropical timber sector meet these conditions? (c) What actions could make FSC certification efforts more effective? We conclude that some conditions necessary for a successful supply chain strategy are not found in the tropical timber industry. As a result, FSC certification faces severe limitations as a governance tool for tropical forest conservation. We suggest that a collaborative approach to creating markets for certified timber will improve FSC certificate program effectiveness.
Since the mid-1960s, many scholars have characterized Western Christianity as at odds with environmentalism and ecological values. Yet since the mid-1990s, many observers claim there has been a "greening of Christianity" in the United States. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 General Social Survey, we analyze how pro-environmental self-identified Christians in the U.S. general public are in their self-reported environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, we find that self-identified Christians report lower levels of environmental concern than do non-Christians. Among Christians, religiosity relates positively to pro-environmental behaviors but not to pro-environmental attitudes or beliefs. These results suggest that this presumed greening of Christianity has not yet translated into a significant greening of pro-environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of rank-and-file Christians in the U.S. general public.
Bottled water has rapidly been transformed from an elite niche market into a ubiquitous consumer object. Yet the literature on drinking water privatization has largely neglected the growth of bottled water and its emergence as a global commodity. This article draws on Harvey’s analytic of accumulation by dispossession to explore how commodification unfolds differently across multiple forms of water. Based on ethnographic interviews with participants in two conflicts over spring water extraction in rural U.S. communities by the industry leader Nestlé, we make three arguments. First, contestation over bottled water commodification is refracted through competing framings regarding control over local water that illuminate the industry’s shifting accumulation strategies. Second, conflicts over specific instances of water extraction draw on rival narratives of the purity, uniqueness, and/or mundaneness of this commodity. Third, bottled water’s traits distinguish it materially and conceptually from tap water, necessitating a more nuanced analytical approach to its commodification.
An analysis of how the organic dairy commodity chain in the Northeast United States is structured uncovers significant power asymmetries and conflicting tendencies regarding the treadmill of production in organic dairy farming, distribution, and marketing, thus calling into the question the capacity of the state to simultaneously promote markets and transform agriculture in the direction of ecological sustainability. While organic certification has contributed to highly centralized business structures and more advanced processing technology at the distribution and marketing levels, it has also fostered significant changes in farming practices that represent a shift away from intensification and industrialization of agriculture. The standards governing organic dairy production require a slowing down of bovine metabolism and an overall reduction in material throughput, even as the economic system flowing from this regulatory regime has led to changes in milk processing, distribution, and economic control that constitute an acceleration of the treadmill of production.
Market-based approaches have become a prominent strategy of environmental movement organizations. This article proposes that such approaches contribute to neoliberalization and its legitimation. Using a case study of the sustainable seafood movement and its use of market-based approaches, this article analyzes the ways that the movement’s consumer, restaurant, and retailer campaigns contribute to and legitimate neoliberalization. Specifically, in using market-based approaches, sustainable seafood organizations are contributing to and legitimating neoliberal notions of individualism, marketization, and the devolution of regulatory authority. Given such findings, I argue that the sustainable seafood movement is "in the market and for it." As such, I suggest the movement’s transformative capacity may be limited, and in using market-based approaches it may be facilitating processes of capitalist accumulation that environmental sociologists have widely identified as antithetical to environmental sustainability.