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R.E. Freeman, J. Pierce, and R. Dodd. Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business: How Firms Can Be Profitable and Leave Our Children a Living Planet. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.
A philosopher, a religion scholar, and a student of management who also does environmental consulting shared a number of meals and cups of coffee in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the late 1990s. What resulted was this small, practitioner-oriented book that attempts to engage business executives in "conversations" about how their respective firms can meet not only economic but also socioethical and environmental goals. In the course of 95 quickly read pages they discuss their views on the multiple "shades of green" that businesses and their stakeholders exhibit, some principles of green capitalism, the several environmentalist mind-sets, and a handful of suggestions for organizational change. Along the way, they provide a well-written practitioner's perspective on environmentalism, featuring a number of green business examples and several helpful checklists for moving businesses in more environmentally benign directions. They close by appending a 25-page primer on environmental issues, which is fairly representative of the environmental challenges faced by developing countries.
Using conversational tone, the authors develop a collage of ideas that contribute to advancing the business greening purpose. First, they employ a stakeholder framework, or story as they term it, indicating a loose continuum of businesses' satisfying ever more environmental stakeholders. Given the well-known history of the lead author, Ed Freeman, in promoting the stakeholder concept, the fact that this is the book's major strength will not be surprising. He and his coauthors assert that businesses can exhibit at least four shades of green. The light green, or compliance shade, recommends that firms satisfy their environmental compliance government stakeholders (and employees), whereas the slightly greener market shade focuses on customer stakeholder satisfaction. The next greener shade they term stakeholder green and includes suppliers, communities, employees, investors, and interest groups as the focal points for that collaborative approach. Finally, the dark green shade seems to imply that some aspect of the natural environment, whether future human generations, nonhuman species, life in general, or the Earth overall, can be the ultimate beneficiary of this strategy.
Secondly, and related to the first point, the authors, again probably driven by the lead...