Fashioning the environment

Should we regard 'greening' as a management fashion? While green concerns a re prevalent in political and industrial rhetoric, how is greening made to appear attractive and productive to organizational actors who plainly feel just the opposite? This paper explores the social and emotional architectur e of greening, and its tensions and contradictions. Against a background of 'received' theory on management fashions, it examines the institutional co ntext of greening, the role of consultants, stakeholder voices and the acti ve efforts of industry to capture greening on its own terms. The analysis s hows that, despite a strong societal surge towards greening, it can often a ppear neither attractive nor rational to industry-yet it is adopted, or pre sented, in some form.