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Renewing Business History in the Era of the Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2019

Ann-Kristin Bergquist
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Extract

This special issue is concerned with new approaches in business history to exploration of the role of business in both creating and addressing the mounting environmental crisis that has become apparent over the last half century. Two decades have passed since Business History Review published a pioneering special issue on business and the natural environment. The guest editors of that issue, Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers, called for an “ecocultural approach” to business history and noted that strikingly little attention had been given to the issue of business and the natural environment in the field.

Keywords

sustainabilitybusiness and the environmentgreen businessenvironmental historythe Anthropocene
Type
Introduction
Information
Business History Review , Volume 93 , Issue 1: Business and the Environment Revisited , Spring 2019 , pp. 3 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2019 

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Footnotes

I would especially like to thank the participants of the conference “Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Sustainability,” held at the Harvard Business School on June 14, 2018, for thoughtful comments and overall inspiration. I also want to thank the editors of this journal for helpful comments and the contributors to this special issue, from whose work I learned a lot. Special thanks to Geoffrey Jones and Andrew A. King for challenging my thoughts. Financial support from the Swedish Research Council, the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation, and the Division of Research and Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School is gratefully acknowledged.

References

1 Rosen, Christine Meisner and Sellers, Christopher C., “The Nature of the Firm: Towards an Ecocultural History of Business,” Business History Review 73, no. 4 (1999): 577–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar. They urge business historians to draw on terms and modes of analysis that evolved in the field of environmental history and argue that business historians have an opportunity to develop the environmental history enterprise.

2 Berghoff, Hartmut and Rome, Adam, Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The volume contains chapters by both business and environmental historians. Guest editorials in special issues include Christine Rosen, Meisner, “Doing Business History in the Age of Global Climate Change,” Enterprise & Society 8, no. 2 (2007): 221–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berghoff, Hartmut and Mutz, Mathias “Missing Links? Business History and Environmental Change,” Jahrbuch für Wirtshaftsgeschicte/Economic History Yearbook 59, no. 2 (2009): 9–22Google Scholar; Aggeri, Franck and Cartel, Mélodie, “Le changement climatique et les entreprises: Enjeux, espaces d'action, régulations internationales,” Entreprises et Historie 1, no. 86 (2017): 6–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Andrew and Geer, Kirsten, “Uniting Business History and Global Environmental History,” Business History 59, no. 7 (2017): 987–1009CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Articles published in Business History Review since the last special issue include Sluyterman, Keetie, “Royal Dutch Shell: Company Strategies for Dealing with Environmental Issues,” Business History Review 84, no. 2 (2010): 203–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bergquist, Ann-Kristin and Söderholm, Kristina, “Green Innovation Systems in Swedish Industry, 1960–1989,” Business History Review 85, no. 4 (2011): 677–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bergquist, Ann-Kristin and Lindmark, Magnus, “Sustainability and Shared Value in the Interwar Swedish Copper Industry,” Business History Review 90, no. 2 (2016): 197–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 The first stage of the Anthropocene is commonly linked to the Industrial Revolution in England. See, for example, Steffen, Will, Crutzen, Paul J., and McNeill, John R., “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Steffen, Will, Richardson, Katherine, Rockström, Johan, Cornell, Sarah E., Fetzer, Ingo, Bennett, Elena M., Biggs, Reinette, et al. , “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347, no. 6223 (13 Feb. 2015)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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19 Bansal and Hoffman, Oxford Handbook; Jones, Profits,

20 Climate change, toxic chemical emissions, and other problems are increasingly identified as “wicked problems,” which are difficult or impossible for business to solve, because of complex contractionary requirements not only constrained by internal organizational barriers, but founded in the very rules of the market economy. See, for example, Wright, Christopher and Nyberg, Daniel, “An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual,” Academy of Management Journal 7, no. 5 (2017): 1633–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction (Cambridge, UK, 2015).

21 Guha, Ramachandra, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Klaus Weber and Sara B. Soderstrom, “Social Movements, Business and the Environment,” in Bansal and Hoffman, Oxford Handbook, 248–65; Jones, Profits.

22 See, for example, Uekötter, Frank, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburgh, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Divergent Responses to Identical Problems: Businessmen and the Smoke Nuisance in Germany and the United States, 1880–1917,” Business History Review 73, no. 4 (1999): 641–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosen, Christine Meisner, “Businessmen against Pollution in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Business History Review 69, no. 3 (1995): 351–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840–1864,” Environmental History 8, no. 4 (2003): 565–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mutz, Mattias, “Managing Resources: Water and Wood in the German Pulp and Paper Industry 1870s–1930s,” Jahrbuch für Wirtshaftsgeschiticthe/Economic History Yearbook 59, no. 2 (2009): 45–68Google Scholar; and Bergquist and Lindmark, “Sustainability.”

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24 Bergquist and Söderholm, “Green Innovation”; Bergquist, and Söderholm, , “Transition to Greener Pulp: Regulation, Industry Responses and Path Dependency,” Business History 57, no. 6 (2015): 862–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Geoffrey and Lubinski, Christina, “Making ‘Green Giants’: Environmental Sustainability in the German Chemical Industry, 1950s–1980s,” Business History 56, no. 4 (2014): 623–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindmark, Magnus and Bergquist, Ann-Kristin, “Expansion for Pollution Reduction? Environmental Adaptation of a Swedish and a Canadian Metal Smelter, 1960–2005,” Business History 50 no. 4 (2008): 530–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hartmut Berghoff, “Shades of Green: A Business-History Perspective on Eco-Capitalism,” in Berghoff and Rome, Green Capitalism?, 13–31. On how environmental pressures impacted the waste industry, see Stokes, Raymond, Köster, Roman, and Sambrook, Stephen C., The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany, 1945 to the Present (Cambridge, UK, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See, for example, Sluyterman, “Royal Dutch Shell”; Bergquist and Söderholm, “Transition”; and Ann-Kristin Bergquist, “Dilemmas of Going Green: Environmental Strategies in the Swedish Mining Company Boliden, 1960–2005,” in Berghoff and Rome, Green Capitalism?, 147–71.

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30 The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change. Johan Rockström, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (24 Sept. 2009): 472–75; Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries”; Whiteman, Gail, Walker, Brian, and Perego, Paolo, “Planetary Boundaries: Ecological Foundations for Corporate Sustainability,” Journal of Management Studies 50, no. 2 (2013): 307–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 One exception is Mira Wilkins, who noted that the U.S. government in the 1970s imposed new standards for safety, emission control and mile-per-gallon performance on cars sold in the United States, and the cost burden imposed on the domestic automobile industry by these regulations, especially by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. See Wilkins, “Multinational Automobile Enterprises and Regulation: An Historical Overview,” in Government, Technology, and the Future of the Automobile, ed. Douglas H. Ginsburg and William Abernathy (New York, 1980), 221–58.

34 The contradictory requirements of fuel efficiency and control of NOx emissions was one of the key reasons driving the so-called Dieselgate scandal. Brand, Christian, “Beyond ‘Dieselgate’: Implications of Unaccounted and Future Air Pollutant Emissions and Energy Use for the United Kingdom,” Energy Policy 97 (Oct. 2016): 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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41 See, for example, Chrun, Elizabeth, Dolsak, Nives, and Prakash, Aseem, “Corporate Environmentalism: Motivations and Mechanisms,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 41 (2016): 341–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lyon, Thomas P. and Maxwell, John W., Corporate Environmentalism and Public Policy (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoffman, Heresy.

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43 Chrun, Dolsak, and Prakash, “Corporate Environmentalism.”

44 Jones, Profits, 233–62.

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47 Hoffman, Heresy, 87–140.

48 The management scholar Andrew J. Hoffman has suggested a periodization of the history of corporate environmentalism as a movement along an evolutionary adaptive learning process since the 1960s, with a proactive, strategic mode of corporate environmentalism developing from the 1980s. Hoffman, Heresy.

49 Jones, Profits, 359–60.

50 See Jones, Profits.

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52 Elkington “25 Years Ago.”

53 Scholars have debated and provided frameworks to predict the “next” industrial revolution; for example, Hawken, Paul, Lovins, Amory B., and Lovins, L. Hunter, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

54 Jones, Profits. The key role of financial markets in contributing to a low-carbon economy is stressed in the recent special issue on Finance for Environmental Transition in Organization & Environment. Celine Louche, Timo Busch, Patricia Crifo, and Marcus, Alfred, “Financial Markets and the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy: Challenging the Dominant Logics,” Organization & Environment 32, no. 1 (2019): 3–17Google Scholar.

55 John Ehrenfeld has argued that virtually everything business has done in the name of environmental management, greening, eco-efficiency, and sustainability refers to reducing unsustainability. Ehrenfeld, Beyond the Brave; Ehrenfeld and Hoffman, Andrew J., Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability (Stanford, 2013)Google Scholar.

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60 Frank Uekötter, among others, has criticized the environmental historians for their monolithic view of capitalism. See Uekötter, , “Confronting the Pitfalls of Current Environmental History: An Argument for an Organisational Approach,” Environment and History 4, no. 1 (1998): 37Google Scholar.

61 Scholars have suggested that U.S. companies in the coal, oil, automobile, utility, and chemical industries lobbied politicians, challenging the science of climate, while European industry, by contrast, was far less aggressive in responding to the issue. See, for example, Levy, David L. and Kolk, A., “Strategic Responses to Climate Change: Conflicting Pressures on Multinationals in the Oil Industry,” Business and Politics 4, no. 3 (2002): 275–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, David L. and Newell, Peter L., “Oceans Apart? Business Responses to the Environment in Europe and North America,” Environment 42, no. 9 (2000): 8–20Google Scholar; and Skjaerseth, John Bierger and Skodvin, Tora, “Climate Change and the Oil Industry: Common Problems, Different Strategies,” Global Environmental Politics 1, no. 4 (2001): 43–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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67 EDGAR – Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (CO2 time series 1990–2015 per region/country; accessed 5 Mar. 2019), http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts1990-2015&sort=des9.

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71 Although the Anthropocene is generally traced back to the Industrial Revolution, many argue that it is best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout of radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing. More, Jason W., introduction to Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. More, Jason W. (Oakland, 2016), 1-13Google Scholar; Lewis, Simon L. and Maslin, Mark L., “Defining the Anthropocene,” Science 519 (12 Mar. 2015): 171–80Google ScholarPubMed.

72 More, introduction, 5.

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