Environmental Management as political Sustainability

Grounded in critical theory and the Gramscian concept of hegemony, this article argues that environmental management (EM) can be understood as an accommodation to growing public awareness of environmental problems that potentially threatens dominant hegemonic coalitions. On the material level, EM is a set ofpractices that ameliorates the more egregious environmental consequences of industrial production; on the ideological and symbolic level, EM constructs products and companies as "green " and legitimizes the primacy of corporate management's role in addressing environmentalproblems. EM is thus seen to be more about political than environmental sustainability. E nvironmental management (EM) has grown rapidly in the last few years as an emergent set of managerial practices as well as a new subdisci-pline within the academic field of management. EM is critical of traditional business practices that ignore the impact of business activities on the natural environment and that treat the earth as an infinite reserve of natural resources and a bottomless sink for industrial waste (Shrivastava, 1995a; Starik & Rands, 1995). Proponents of EM argue that by adopting a range of managerial practices that take account of the linkages between business organizations and the environment, sustainabl