Greening Of Management

8 Pages 1921 Words

3.0 Development of “Greening of Management”

For centuries business institutions, under the orders of management, were able to treat natural resources such as air, water and land as free, limitless resources. Because no one entity owned them, these companies used and polluted as they pleased without considering their impact on our environment (Valasquez, 1998). In the 1960’s and 1970’s, there was a large amount of pressure being put on both the government and corporate sector to become more environmentally friendly. Yet most companies attempted to avoid government environmental regulations at all costs. In the mid 1970’s a few multinational corporations began to re-structure their style of management to take a more pro-active approach to environmental management and ease pressure from activist groups (Berry & Rondinelli, 1998).
During the 1980’s business’s started to bow to pressure by environmental activist groups and government agencies to increase pollution control and further comply with regulations. Instead of waiting for environmental problems to happen and then deal with them, the companies began to actively seek improvements and solutions as a preventative measure. It wasn’t until the early 1990’s greening of management as a mainstream business practice really became popular. Not only were companies now totally complying with government regulations, they were setting their own stringent environmental standards. For example, in a time period of five years General Electric decreased toxic emissions by 90 percent and Xerox reduced their hazardous waste output by 50 percent (Berry & Rondinelli, 1998). Overall the development of green management has lead to a significant reduction on pollution output across the corporate sector.

4.0 Types of ‘Greening’

There are 4 main categories that each corporation will fall into regarding t...