Simone Pulver
Brown UniversityTransitioning to a Low-Carbon Economy: The sociological contributionWhat do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global
climate change?
All would agree that the eighty percent cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which are
described as necessary to avoid serious adverse impacts on the global climate system, will entail the restructuring
of global, national, regional, and local economies. Sociology offers insights on the patterns, drivers, and obstacles
to this restructuring, at both the micro-agent and macro-structure levels.
From a micro-agent, firm-level perspective, we understand the drivers of firm environmental behavior.
Standard models point to four sources of pressure that cause firms to adopt environmentally friendly policies
and practices. They include three external drivers: market pressures and opportunities, current and pending
government regulation, and stakeholder pressures. Market pressures and opportunities can take the form of
lowering costs of inputs and/or waste disposal, green marketing, and enhancing rent-earning characteristics
of firms such as reputation or product quality. Firms comply with regulation to avoid the fines and penalties
associated with noncompliance. Finally, stakeholder pressure, embodied in campaigns by environmental
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), local communities, or shareholder groups, can also drive changes in
firm behavior (see for example Bansal and Roth 2000; Levy 1995; O’Rourke 2003; Prakash 2000; Pulver 2007).
Transformational leadership is the fourth driver of firm greening, but unlike the other external forms of pressure,
its origin is within the firm (Gladwin 1993; Weinberg 1998).
There are two primary ways to explain the mechanism linking external pressure to change in firm
environmental behavior. The first models firms as rational actors with fixed interests based on their operational
characteristics. Within this framework, variation in firm environmental behavior is the result of differences in
external pressures, differences in firm operational characteristics, or a combination of the two (see for example,
Baylis, Connell, and Flynn 1998). In contrast, new institutionalist models of firm behavior reject economic,
rational actor theories of the firm and the idea of fixed interests based on firm characteristics. Rather, they argue
that firm interests and drivers of firm action are constituted via a process of shared knowledge creation by a firm
and other actors in its organizational field (see for example Hoffman and Ventresca 2002). When explaining
variation in firm greening, new institutionalists highlight the intensity and density of formal and informal network
ties between managers and other actors in their organizational fields, including competitors, suppliers, product
customers, and regulatory agencies (Biggart and Lutzenhiser 2007), the key role of perceptions of issue salience
(Bansal and Roth 2000), and the values of individual managers (Hoffman 2001) to firms’ assessments of the
benefits of ecological responsiveness. Thus, firms with similar operations, facing similar market, regulatory,
and stakeholder pressures, may adopt diverging strategies because of divergent understandings prevalent in the
particular economic, political, and socio-ideological networks in which individual firm managers are embedded.
Organizational and economic sociologists, as well as scholars in political science and business strategy,
have used this standard framework of firm environmental behavior to analyze the climate strategies and practices
of firms at the forefront of the business-climate change interface including oil companies, electric utilities, car
companies, and the insurance industry (Rowlands 2000; Levy and Newell 2000; Levy and Kolk 2002; van den
Hove, Le Menestrel, and de Bettignies 2002; van der Woerd et al. 2000; Austin and Sauer 2002; Engels 2006;
Levy and Rothenberg 2002; Mills 2005; Pulver 2007; Skjaerseth and Skodvin 2001).