Considering the potential for understanding how organizations contribute to environmental impacts
and how the environment and natural resource issues impact organizations, it is surprising how little
organizational and environmental sociologists studying similar issues have built on each other’s
insights. Traditionally, environmental sociology has offered well-developed theories of the macro
political, economic, and cultural factors influencing environmental degradation and reform along with
more micro social psychological explanations of environmentalism. Environmental sociology has
only engaged occasionally with the inspection of metalevel understandings of the role of organizational
processes in environmental degradation and reform and the variation in these behaviors and
outcomes. In particular, it is generally limited in its understandings of variations in organizational
behavior (theorizing sectors of society as homogenous groups of organizations) and the related variations
in organizational environmental outcomes. In contrast, organizational theory has developed a
strong body of research on why and how organizations do what they do by theorizing both organizational
and interorganizational processes, but it often falls short of accounting for the larger political
economic context of environmental issues and the extent of the material basis of organizations.