The sum of these propositions advocates for a materialist research agenda that seeks to
place organizational actions within their proper social, political, and economic relations. Environmental
sociology provides us competing theorizations of how state, civil society, and firm organizations are
embedded in a capitalist political economic system that structures power relations between them and
its outcomes. Social institutions mediate the relationships between organizations and the natural
environment. The social institutions of money and global financial markets play a particular role in
abstracting material resources and facilitating their transformation across time and space thus hiding
the true nature of the relationship between organizations and the natural environment. It is within
these organizational, economic, and political relations that organizations seek to influence the
definition of various social institutions and change their relationship with the natural environment.
Organizational actions, singly and collectively, may try to alter the system but are constrained in their
choices of how to do so. The environmental outcomes of these efforts are highly contingent because
of the interdependencies and feedbacks embedded in the capitalist political–economic system and
its social institutions. To ignore the challenges that the capitalist system poses to sustainability, to
systematically focus narrowly on an organization, an industry, a nation, without considering the
larger relations, is a disservice to the discipline of sociology, the public, and the environment. A
research path focused on understanding organizational actions and their consequences, as not just
socially, but politically, economically, and materially connected can help more truly assess our ideals
of sustainability.