Abstract

Climate change represents the grandest of challenges facing humanity. In the space of two centuries of industrial development, human civilization has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, with devastating consequences. Business organizations are central to this challenge, in that they support the production of escalating greenhouse gas emissions but also offer innovative ways to decarbonize our economies. In this paper, we examine how businesses respond to climate change. Based on five in-depth case studies of major Australian corporations over a 10-year period (2005–2015), we identify three key stages in the corporate translation of climate change: framing, localizing, and normalizing. We develop a grounded model that explains how the revolutionary import of grand challenges is converted into the mundane and comfortable concerns of “business as usual.” We find that critique is the major driver of this process by continuously revealing the tensions between the demands of the grand challenge and business imperatives. Our paper contributes to the literature on business and the natural environment by identifying how and why corporate environmental initiatives deteriorate over time. More specifically, we highlight the policy limitations of a reliance on business and market responses to the climate crisis.

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Published online 7 November 2016

Published in print 1 October 2017

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We would like to thank Jennifer Howard-Grenville for her outstanding editorial guidance and the three anonymous referees for their constructive feedback in helping to develop this paper. We would also like to thank members of the University of Sydney and University of Newcastle business schools for their input on earlier versions of the paper. Funding for the research upon which this paper is based was provided by the Australian Research Council (Discovery funding scheme, project number DP110104066).

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An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual

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