The rhetoric of leadership: the competition toward environmental friendliness

As taking environmental consideration may be considered to be a bizarre activity for organization actors, efforts to present environmental activities as business-as-usual emerge. A dominating rhetoric used by environmental advocates is the metaphor of competition. Environmental adaptation is a race; rewards for the winners include more innovative product development, barriers of market entry, lean resource use, committed collaborators, and a better corporate image. Losers are those who will not be able to reap all the benefits, and hence the race is on. In this paper I analyze how a business -driven environmental ideology is forwarded to organization actors in a transnational manufacturing corporation. The paper explores how the three discourses Nature, Market and Management are used by managers to convey the ideology. A fundamental concept within the three discourses is that of competition, which works as the prime argument for setting the ideology to work. The environment is becoming part of management practice In the 1960s, environmental issues were of little concern to most business organizations. In the 1990s, the environment is an important judgment in managers' decisions. The number of environmental regulations are increasing and environmental organizations that did not exist in the 1960s now have large numbers of members. Many European countries have green parties with parliament representation, and the general public claims to be increasingly interested in environmental issues (Bennulf, 1994). Business magazines have special issues on the environment, 'environmental manager' is an established profession and corporate environmental management is a subject at an increasing number of universities. Managers are exposed to environmental issues more frequently than earlier, and experience pressure to become more environmentally considerate. The influence from environmental pressure groups is even expected to increase in the future (Belz & Strannegård, 1997). Environmental issues are hence of concern to business managers, and "the environment" is taken into account in an increasing number of business decisions. Even though business organizations consider environmental issues to be increasingly important, media tells us that the state of the world is continuously deteriorating, and companies are accused of being heavily responsible for this development. Corporate managers to a certain extent accept such charges; they consider the organizations they represent to play a role in this context (Belz & Strannegård, 1997). Then how come companies do not take more environmental responsibility than they do? Even though environmental