How we are learning to pollute less: Pollution control, organizational culture, and social learning.

摘要

Pollution control policy makers should see their work as a device by which society learns how to control its pollution.;Second, the pollution control-related actions of companies are often too complex to be explained as straightforward attempts to maximize profits. Instead, their actions might be better understood as consequences of their organizational cultures. The same is true for the pollution control-related actions of government agencies, advocacy groups, legislatures, and the other organizations that take part in the pollution control debate. Such cultures can be described in terms of their norms, theories-in-action, symbolic languages, subgroup conflicts, and social network influences.;Third, pollution control policies intervene in the cultures of such organizations, and assist particular subgroups in their competition for control. Organizations can be said to learn from such interventions.;Fourth, given all this, pollution control policy makers might best view their task as one of creating heuristic devices both for the individual organizations involved in the pollution control debate, and for society in general. In particular, society faces two fields of learning here. First, society has to learn how much pollution should be controlled, and second, society has to learn how best to control pollution.;There are several reasons for this. First, the task of devising such policy is generally too complex to allow us to assess all external pollution costs and require all polluters to pay them.;These arguments are illustrated by case studies of four organizations. The first organization, Cambridge Plating Company, was an electroplating firm in which the top management consciously decided to try to comply with the pollution control laws before having those laws enforced on the firm. In contrast, the second firm (identity concealed) started complying only after a disgruntled employee "blew the whistle". The third organization, Clean Water Action Project, was an environmental advocacy group which reduced its emphasis on sewage-related pollution issues in order to concentrate on the problems of toxic pollution. In the fourth organization, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering, policy-makers were developing policies to promote the source reduction of hazardous pollution and waste.