Abstract
There is growing appreciation that it is not human technology so much as patterns of human activity that is the driving force for changes in the natural environment. When addressing these institutionalized human activity patterns attention is usually drawn to the extremes, either the macro scale of national and international institutions or the micro scale of individual habits and behavior. However, organizations, particularly economic organizations, constitute one of the most pervasive forms of institutionalized human activity on the planet, and are responsible for ordering biophysical resource flows on a grand scale. Thus, the design of these meso-scale institutions requires serious attention when considering the relationship between human activity patterns and environmental change. Organization design is an organic, emergent process of negotiated human action produced and reproduced over time, involving both intentioned and contingent behavior. It both constrains and enables the activities of individual stakeholders, but at the same time the organization itself is both constrained and enabled by the larger institutional network of which it is part. The study of entrepreneurship has a long tradition of investigating how individuals come to create new organizations designed to serve specific ends within a dynamic institutional environment. It therefore offers a rich framework for understanding how organizations can be designed the contribute positively to environmental change. To that end, this paper presents the findings of an empirical research project aimed at understanding the creative design process of entrepreneurs who created new organizations that survive in private market environments and also contribute positively to environmental change. The results are based on in-depth case studies of a number of experienced ‘sustainable entrepreneurs’, drawn from North America, Europe, and Africa. The case findings are synthesized to explain how certain guiding logics in the design process enables the formation of such innovative organizations. The paper compares the logics of entrepreneurship with the logics of appropriateness and consequence, and concludes that the design of private institutions requires a fundamentally different logic than the design of public intuitions.
|