THE GREENING OF ORGANIZATIONS

This article draws some parallels between administrative trends of the past 15 years and principles drawn from the ecology movement. This ta sk is facilitated by the fact that ecologists have been interested in areas that go beyond questions of air, water, and soil. Both administr ative practices and the ecology movement have been recommending a depa rture from primitive mechanics, because both advocate diversity flexib ility, and human scale and recommend institutional arrangements that a re based on dediffentiation, fusion, and a less segmented view of real ity. A bewildering array of terms has been used to describe emerging t rends in organizational life (post-Weberian, ecological postmodern, an d others), but it may be reassuring to know that organization theory h as always had, in its midst, notions that help us understand these new realities.