The intersection of environmental and business history, while growing more diverse in recent years, has tended to cluster into two distinct areas when it comes to viewing corporations as environmental actors: either celebrating outlying cases of firms that have successfully made ecological ethics fundamental to their missions or critiquing efforts at corporate sustainability as “green washing.” Responding to calls for more integration of environmental and business history, recent work in both fields has started to navigate the space between the two, digging more into the details of how environmental influences have changed business practices and vice versa. Still, in 2019, scholars at this intersection see the development of an “ecocultural approach” to business history as only so far capturing the “tip of the iceberg” (Rosen and Sellers, 1999; Bergquist, 2019).
This panel contributes to this ongoing bridging effort by looking at the technics of the corporation and affiliated organizations such as unions as legal and institutional entities embedded in broader social relationships being negotiated around changing environmental conditions, concerns, and regulatory regimes. Christine Rosen examines how urban business leaders spearheaded anti-air and water pollution movements during the Progressive Era. Drawing analogies between the 1920s and the present, Tyler Priest examines the rise of an “environmental performance ethic” in the oil and gas industry and explains its erosion in recent decades by exemptions and exclusions to environmental laws and the general incapacitation of public institutions. Finally, Abby Spinak inquires about the historical relationship between business ownership and environmental performance, exploring claims that democratic ownership models (e.g. cooperatives, credit unions, etc.) are more aligned with environmental goals than other corporate forms.
In our efforts to expand an approach to studying businesses as a multitude of different forms of human organization in changing political, cultural, material, and ecological contexts, this panel aims to move beyond the idea that business is somehow naturally antagonistic to ecological concern, but rather to explore how those antagonisms have been constructed at different historical moments and how these movements (as well as efforts to transcend them) have in turn changed relationships between people and the non-human world.