Evolving Conceptualizations of Organizational Environmentalism: A Path Generation Account
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past 30 years, organizations of many different kinds have introduced environmental preoccupations into decision-making, engaging with – and in many cases co-constructing – a striking array of rankings, best practices, standards and other governance tools. However, there has thus far been surprisingly little exploration of the evolving normative implications of environmentalism: existing organizational research treats environmentalism as a static, uniform and quasi-naturalistic phenomenon. In this article, we argue instead that environmentalism is fluid and multifaceted, evolving over time to produce differing conceptualizations that become affiliated with – and mobilized by – particular groups of actors. Using the theoretical framing of path generation, we identify how environmentalism follows a path characterized by episodes of re-conceptualization and re-labelling, a discursive evolution reflecting incremental yet consequential interactions with other institutional paths. We engage in a conceptual history to identify junctures where environmentalism meets with other institutional trajectories, facilitating shifts in meaning. We identify moments of crookedness in the transnational environmental path that are symbolically reflected in label changes – from the emergence of “sustainable development” in the 1980s, to “sustainability” in the 1990s, and more recently, an offshoot towards “resilience”. Those label changes are not only, we propose, symbolic markers but are also performative and entrench consequential regime transformations with regard to environmentalism. Through our exploration, we contribute to theory development while also generating empirical implications: theory-wise, we identify mechanisms of path generation that inform broader debates around path dependence. Empirically, we illustrate how different variants of environmentalism are connected to specific meaning systems, exhibiting affinity with different organizational fields.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".