The Greening of Organizations

Abstract

This article draws some parallels between administrative trends of the past 15 years and principles drawn from the ecology movement. This task is facilitated by the fact that ecologists have been interested in areas that go beyond questions of air, water, and soil. Both administrative practices and the ecology movement have been recommending a departure from primitive mechanics, because both advocate diversity flexibility, and human scale and recommend institutional arrangements that are based on dedifferentiation, fusion, and a less segmented view of reality A bewildring array of terms has been used to describe emerging trends in organizational life (post-Weberian, ecological postmodern, and others), but it may be reassuring to know that organization theory has always had 4 in its midst notions that help us understand these new realities.