Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF
CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: A
BUSINESS HISTORIAN'S PERSPECTIVE
CHRISTINE MEISNER ROSEN
Industrial ecology is an important new approach to thinking about how to
manage business's interface with the natural environment. I want to speak
about it from my perspective as someone who both teaches in a business
school and is a historian studying the history of pollution control in the
United States. I argue that industrial ecology is a potentially transforming
concept not only for business managers but also for historians who study
business and the environment.
Business historians have been remarkably uninterested in business's
impact on the environment. Most early work in business history focused
on people like John D. Rockefeller, the architect of the American petro-
leum industry. Historians studied the history of business from the vantage
point of the men who created big business, viewing the development of
business as the history of “robber barons” or “industrial statesmen.” They
gave very little attention, if any, to the environmental impact of industrial
development, even insofar as environmentally destructive industries like
the petroleum industry were concerned. In the 1960s, Alfred Chandler
transformed the field of business history into something much more
sophisticated and much less concerned with individual businesspeople.
Chandler and the generation of business historians he inspired have focused
on trying to explain the internal evolution of large, modern, vertically inte-
grated firms.They have examined in great depth the strategies and internal
organizational structures that managers developed in order to take advan-
tage of economies of scale and scope.These historians also paid little atten-
tion to business's environmental impacts or to the management of those
impacts.
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Until recently, environmental historians have also been remarkably dis-
engaged with the issue of how people in business managed their organiza-
