Corporate Ecology

Corporate ecology is a term used to describe the process through which resources are collected and transformed by corporate entities for use by citizens in modern, free market societies. Influenced by systems theory, corporate ecology seeks to achieve a deeper understanding and appreciation of the dynamic processes through which resources are concentrated and redistributed throughout interlinked elements including living organisms, naturally occurring physical cycles, and corporate activities. More specifically, as corporations act in pursuit of their missions, they have direct and indirect impacts on a variety of people, communities, governments, and natural environmental systems (e.g., air, water, soil, and biodiversity). From this perspective, scholars have found it important to reenvision business as a system nested within, and therefore dependent on, other larger systems, including the social, economic, and natural environments. Since corporate ecology conveys the nature of these systems' interdependencies, it does not imply that corporate activity is good or bad per se. Rather, the idea is that corporate activity has interconnected and multilayered influences and, therefore, must be studied in a multidimensional manner to more completely understand its importance in society.

This understanding has become more significant as members of modern society have become more dependent on corporate production for essential resources required to sustain life. While this may seem like a statement of the obvious, the near total dependence on corporate products to sustain human life is a relatively new development. A mere century ago, for example, nearly 90% of the U.S. population was able to get some proportion of their sustenance from noncorporate sources or self-production. The concomitant changes in resource acquisition and distribution have required new language to allow for proper discussion and analysis of the ecological dimensions of business. Such new language was first introduced to corporate social performance (CSP) modeling by David Saiia when he added corporate ecology to the economic, legal, and ethical responsibilities of Archie Carroll's CSP model to more fully explore these responsibilities as multidimensional, multilayered, and interdependent. Corporate ecology suggests that in some cases activities once deemed acceptable are actually in violation of some aspect of corporate social responsibility or corporate citizenship. For instance, Hooker Chemical exceeded the letter of the law in the disposal of highly toxic waste at Love Canal, but internal documents indicate that some members of the organization voiced doubts about the safety of chemical waste disposal practices at Hooker Chemical. These doubts foreshadowed the terrible consequences that occurred at Love Canal and inspired the Superfund legislation. Love Canal also captures the need and possibility of understanding corporate actions as ecological events. As a first step, William Frederick provided an overarching definition of ecologizing as the ability of business to forge [Page 467]cooperative, collaborative linkages with society that function adaptively to sustain life, which he contrasts to economizing as a process that efficiently converts inputs to outputs through competitive behaviors. Diane Swanson made further contributions to ecologizing by cautioning against reducing business activity to simple categories without reintegrating concepts back into a representation of the whole, including assessing the complementary relationships and dynamic tensions that can exist between ecologizing and economizing.

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