Greenwashing or Striving to Persist: An Alternative Explanation of a Loose Coupling Between Corporate Environmental Commitments and Outcomes

Abstract In response to increasing concerns about environmental degradation, companies started to introduce actions that portrayed their attentiveness to these issues. This commitment, however, hardly translates into actual improvements in corporate environmental performance and outcomes, which leads to accusations of greenwashing. In this conceptual paper, I use the idea of loose coupling to offer an alternative explanation of the disconnection between corporate environmental commitments and outcomes. Whilst companies are often perceived as rational and well-integrated bureaucracies, they, in fact, consist of subassemblies that are simultaneously coupled and responsive yet hold a certain degree of separateness and independence. Such loose coupling isolates an organisation from the external environment and gives the external stimuli only limited access to the system, allowing an organisation to persist. Such an understanding of organisations indicates that greenwashing might result from loose coupling caused by causal indeterminacy as well as a fragmented external and internal environment.