ABSTRACT
In the last decades, an enormous amount of knowledge has been created on the impact of human activities on the natural environment in the environmental field. This concern has been translated into new policies, new research programs, tools and methodologies to decrease the environmental burden of firms’ activities. This chapter reviews the literature on the relationship between the natural environment and the organization, encompassing different units of analysis from the organizational level to the product level. The purpose of the review is threefold. First, it highlights how scholars have made use of existing theoretical frameworks, which may explain and predict the phenomenon under study. Second, it emphasizes the complexity of EPD and ENPD. Third, it shows how environmental ambition has evolved from optimizing production processes to radically changing products and services. Section 4.2 gives an overview on how the relationship between the organization and the natural environment has been addressed, highlighting the theoretical background. Section 4.3 focuses on EPD, illustrating the status quo in research and in practice and the future challenges especially for ENPD.
