In addition to how system feedbacks may influence ultimate environmental outcomes of environmental
initiatives, organizations have limits to the actions available to them. Resource efficiencies and
competitively priced “green” substitutions, like those discussed above, are likely to be the most commonly
undertaken corporate environmental actions as they are argued to improve or maintain profit
margins (Mol, 1995). Pulver (2007) argues that understanding variations in firm environmental behavior
is a necessary step to understanding eventual broader tendencies in capitalism. By employing new
institutionalist models of firm behavior, Pulver focuses on bottom-up organizational processes in the
interpretation of contestation of what is economically profitable and environmentally desirable. This
perspective on social embeddedness and interpretation of environmental conditions provides useful
understanding on how firms come to make certain decisions within a certain range of profitability. It
improves our understanding of the behavior of the parts in their social context in which they are
found. However, as sociologists proceed in undertaking these organizational and sectoral studies it
is important to simultaneously understand the social and economic systems that serve as the context
of these actions and the material constraints to them. There are clearly a number of stances and
actions a corporation can take. However, corporate decisions are bound by the logic of the capitalist
system, which is coercive in nature as discussed earlier. Most obviously, we know this because any
organization that alters its organizational objectives to pursue environmental objectives at the cost
of its profit objectives will cease to exist. The trajectory of capitalism can be adjusted via the aggregation
of organizational decisions to cause more or less damage to the environment but the trajectory
is still toward using resources at an increasing rate to meet a growth imperative (Anderson, 1976;
Schnaiberg, 1980).