In focusing on organizations and their role in the natural environment for greening our society,
there is an implicit assumption that organizational greening will aggregate to a greening of capitalism.
There are several reasons to think that this thinking may be faulty. The ecological fallacy (Robinson,
1950) documents that the coefficient between two individual-level variables is generally not the same
as that between those same variables for aggregates into which the individuals are grouped. In studying
organizations and the environment, this also implies the existence of a “reverse ecological fallacy”
that firm-level data correlating firm changes and environmental improvements do not necessarily
produce the same correlations at the industry or economy level (York & Rosa, 2003).
The concept of emergence in complex systems theory supports the in-depth analysis of organizations
within their system contexts to enable the understanding of relationship between individual
units and their aggregates: