ABSTRACT
This article addresses the problem of how change and innovation can create a fuller voice for ecological interests in organizations and public policy through a critical evaluation of current approaches to organizational development and change.
The first section of the article points out shortcomings of earlier approaches to planned organizational development and change in relation to achieving ecological sustainability requirements. It is then suggested that the newer, systems-wide and inclusive approaches to organizational development practice and theory may overcome these limitations. As an example, the article explores co-evolutionary approaches that use complex adaptive systems thinking, arguing that such interventions will enable a focus on issues at the institutional level. A dialectical model of institutional change, which incorporates activist input and channels conflict into innovative outcomes, is then examined. The article then presents a case example of how a dialectical model combined with a co-evolutionary perspective, could foster the institutional change required to facilitate the integration of ecological priorities into organizational and public policy and decision-making. A major challenge for organizations is how to balance and incorporate compet-
ing interests, values and constituencies (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983; Buenger et al., 1996). However, the now pressing debate on how to balance human requirements and economic priorities with ecological sustainability confronts managers with new and more difficult challenges. Non-human stakeholders are now to be considered as relevant stakeholders with whom it is important to build enduring and mutually beneficial relationships (Maak, 2007), with authoritative sources claiming impending conditions of crisis unless ecological issues are given more equal countenance in decision-making (Mooney et al., 2005; Stern, 2006; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007). The urgency of the response lies in the need to address a major systems failure entailing a reassessment of the relationship between human and ecological systems (Coupland, 2005; Ehrenfeld, 2005). At the level of the organization, the multiple strategies, modes of assessment
and required standards of ecological sustainability, such as industrial ecology, eco-efficiency and strategic proactivity, point to a highly complex task if such innovations are to be implemented (McDonough and Braungart, 2002; Winn and Zietsma, 2004; Jamali, 2006; Kallio and Nordberg, 2006; Tregigda and Milne, 2006; Dunphy et al., 2007; Waage, 2007). It is important to note that innovation within the context of sustainability may not be the same as innovation in other contexts. Hall and Vredenburg (2003), for example, report that managers have had great difficulty when trying to innovate under pressures from sustainable development. Managers find their innovation strategies are inadequate to accommodate the highly complex and uncertain nature of these new demands. Their previous strategies do not incorporate the constraints of the social and environmental pressures, which involve a wider range of stakeholders as well as more ambiguous and contradictory demands. Stakeholders may include environmental activists, safety advocates and local interests, with different priorities, often less focussed on technical aspects of innovation, as well as the more usual stakeholders such as customers, suppliers or investors (Hall and Martin, 2005). This article assumes that organizations will need to make fundamental changes
in the way they conduct business and work within the tenets of ‘stronger’ versions of sustainability, to ensure human needs do not diminish the supply of natural capital available for future generations (Turner, 1992; Daly, 1996). An accepted body of thought within the corporate sustainability literature is that such an
outcome can only be achieved through high levels of innovation within the organization, leading to product, process or service redesign (Rodriguez et al., 2002; Snyder and Duarte, 2003; Hart, 2005; Laszlo, 2008). However, this literature leaves unanswered the question of how to go beyond technical innovation to engender the paradigmatic change that incorporating ecological values entails. The following section of the article critically evaluates the organizational devel-
opment approach of planned change in light of this requirement. Some critical limitations of the earlier organizational development approaches are identified, particularly in relation to organizational complexity and the relationship between human and ecological systems. Some of the advances of more recent interpretations are noted in this regard.
