Conclusion

For Lockwood (1964, p. 251), the ‘materiality’ of any social ordering is evident in the social reality surrounding it. The material conditions of any such ordering include the technological means of control over the physical and social environment as well as the skills associated with them, constituting the basis for system integration. Social integration, on the other hand, deals with the symbolic sphere, with relations of meaning and the ways in which these define certain types of membership categories in relation to other categories within organizational fields. Hence, social and system integrations are distinct facets of the same ‘reality’. Struggles over relations of meaning and membership create social change through changes in social integration. They redefine what it means to be a member of an organizational field as well as what are normal practices within the contexts in which organizations are embedded. The entry of Greenpeace’s Cooking the Climate into the arena of palm oil poli-

tics destabilized the attempt to create a new institutional legitimacy through certified system integration. The polarized views between industry representatives and NGOs can be observed in the following statement:

At present this is where things stand. Institutionalization of producer interests has not brought the legitimacy desired; the system integration of the organization field has been achieved but it has not created overall social integration. There is evident tension attached to the participation of Unilever who might yet secede under pressure from Greenpeace.