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Greening people
J. Cleaner Prod. Vol. 4. No. 34. pp. 225, 1997 Eisevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain ELSEVIER
Book review Greening People W. Wehrmeyer (Editor) Greenleaf Publishing, 1996, 4 16 pp, ISBN l-874719- 15-2, f29.50. “Social organization”, alongside technology, is mentioned in the 1987 Brundtland Report as one of the two key areas in which things are going to have to change if we are to achieve some form of sustainable development. As the debate has evolved since then and begun to penetrate into the eversceptical field of management, this term has usually tended to be interpreted exclusively as “formal social organizapolicies, mission tion”-procedures, statements, job descriptions, checklists, and so on. The assumption seems to generally have been that, as long as we can get the “hard” stuff right in industry, all the “soft” things, such as comcreativity, mitment, engagement, enthusiasm, “culture”, and “integration”, will simply fall into place. Thus, environmental management has, in its short history, concentrated very much on the quasi-hard, technology-like side of management and organization, with the concepts of the management system environmental (EMS) and design-for-environment (DIE) as prime examples of this. Such approaches, while clearly concerned with the “human factor” in organizations, generally address it through the creation of routinized procedures in combination with a great deal of optimism (some might even call it mysticism) regarding the cultivation and emergent benefits of management commitment, employee participation, and education/training. A faith has emerged around them which holds intriguing yet problematic tenets: for example, that pollution prevention always pays; that environmental management is always a natural ally of best practices in management; that improved environmental per-
formance normally leads to better business performance; and that employees who are engaged and empowered in participation-based environmental management arrangements are happier, more productive, and more loyal. The essence is that dedication to corporate environmental management which involves employees smoothly leads to unequivocal ecological and business gains. As we have begun to gain experience with the latest wave of more elaborate environmental management practices, some complications have become apparent. The “soft side” has, predictably perhaps, shown itself to be far more intricate and unwieldy than the systemscrafters, checklist-writers, and matrixmakers would have you believe. A variety of typical problem areas are now being defined, such as the “green wall” drift” as corporate and “mission evolve. environmental organizations Ahead in the shadowy terrain of sustainable industrial development, a large area of “social organization” which had been neglected is now becoming ever more topical: informal organization, group dynamics, knowledge-based strategic capabilities, and many other items belonging to human resource management (HRM) and organization theory. Greening People is one of the first significant books to go beyond earlier attitudes toward the organization of corporate environmental management and take on both problematic theoretical issues and more realistic management concerns. As a collection of chapters by different authors-some university some pracresearchers, industry titioners-it is hard to generalize about Greening People. There is no unifying thesis or development of an argument. Instead, the various authors present empirically based findings regarding how environmental management has actually unfolded in organizations, with an emphasis upon its HRM dimensions.
Their conclusion is that employees have a broad role to play in the implementation of environmental management, and that this requires subtle management and a long-term commitment by corporate leaders to (possibly radical) organizational change. Some of the chapters were a little uncritical for my own personal taste, writing for example of culture change as if it were a straightforward task, but this is without doubt the most richly detailed and up-to-date resource book so far on the subject of environmental HRM and the organization-theoretical questions which accompany it. Three groups for whom the book should be quite useful are, first, the managers of corporate environmental staffs, second, people involved in developing and operating environmental training programs in industry, and third, researchers and consultants striving to better understand the roles played by individuals and groups in the success or failure of environmental management efforts. A fourth group, however, for whom this book is emphatically recommended is top executives in industries where the environment is becoming a significant competitive issue. The lesson for executives: if you ignore the message of this book and relegate environmental management to technical experts and top-down control systems, then you might avoid non-compliance in the short-run, but you will be unprepared for the future, and you will have failed to stimulate the many processes of economic and ecological value creation which “greened people” can potentially support and perform. Ralph Meima International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics Lund University Sweden
J. Cleaner Prod., 1996, Volume 4, Number
3-4
225
Book review Greening People W. Wehrmeyer (Editor) Greenleaf Publishing, 1996, 4 16 pp, ISBN l-874719- 15-2, f29.50. “Social organization”, alongside technology, is mentioned in the 1987 Brundtland Report as one of the two key areas in which things are going to have to change if we are to achieve some form of sustainable development. As the debate has evolved since then and begun to penetrate into the eversceptical field of management, this term has usually tended to be interpreted exclusively as “formal social organizapolicies, mission tion”-procedures, statements, job descriptions, checklists, and so on. The assumption seems to generally have been that, as long as we can get the “hard” stuff right in industry, all the “soft” things, such as comcreativity, mitment, engagement, enthusiasm, “culture”, and “integration”, will simply fall into place. Thus, environmental management has, in its short history, concentrated very much on the quasi-hard, technology-like side of management and organization, with the concepts of the management system environmental (EMS) and design-for-environment (DIE) as prime examples of this. Such approaches, while clearly concerned with the “human factor” in organizations, generally address it through the creation of routinized procedures in combination with a great deal of optimism (some might even call it mysticism) regarding the cultivation and emergent benefits of management commitment, employee participation, and education/training. A faith has emerged around them which holds intriguing yet problematic tenets: for example, that pollution prevention always pays; that environmental management is always a natural ally of best practices in management; that improved environmental per-
formance normally leads to better business performance; and that employees who are engaged and empowered in participation-based environmental management arrangements are happier, more productive, and more loyal. The essence is that dedication to corporate environmental management which involves employees smoothly leads to unequivocal ecological and business gains. As we have begun to gain experience with the latest wave of more elaborate environmental management practices, some complications have become apparent. The “soft side” has, predictably perhaps, shown itself to be far more intricate and unwieldy than the systemscrafters, checklist-writers, and matrixmakers would have you believe. A variety of typical problem areas are now being defined, such as the “green wall” drift” as corporate and “mission evolve. environmental organizations Ahead in the shadowy terrain of sustainable industrial development, a large area of “social organization” which had been neglected is now becoming ever more topical: informal organization, group dynamics, knowledge-based strategic capabilities, and many other items belonging to human resource management (HRM) and organization theory. Greening People is one of the first significant books to go beyond earlier attitudes toward the organization of corporate environmental management and take on both problematic theoretical issues and more realistic management concerns. As a collection of chapters by different authors-some university some pracresearchers, industry titioners-it is hard to generalize about Greening People. There is no unifying thesis or development of an argument. Instead, the various authors present empirically based findings regarding how environmental management has actually unfolded in organizations, with an emphasis upon its HRM dimensions.
Their conclusion is that employees have a broad role to play in the implementation of environmental management, and that this requires subtle management and a long-term commitment by corporate leaders to (possibly radical) organizational change. Some of the chapters were a little uncritical for my own personal taste, writing for example of culture change as if it were a straightforward task, but this is without doubt the most richly detailed and up-to-date resource book so far on the subject of environmental HRM and the organization-theoretical questions which accompany it. Three groups for whom the book should be quite useful are, first, the managers of corporate environmental staffs, second, people involved in developing and operating environmental training programs in industry, and third, researchers and consultants striving to better understand the roles played by individuals and groups in the success or failure of environmental management efforts. A fourth group, however, for whom this book is emphatically recommended is top executives in industries where the environment is becoming a significant competitive issue. The lesson for executives: if you ignore the message of this book and relegate environmental management to technical experts and top-down control systems, then you might avoid non-compliance in the short-run, but you will be unprepared for the future, and you will have failed to stimulate the many processes of economic and ecological value creation which “greened people” can potentially support and perform. Ralph Meima International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics Lund University Sweden
J. Cleaner Prod., 1996, Volume 4, Number
3-4
225