Organisational structures and roles

This chapter looks at the impact organisational structures have on the pursuit of sustainability, offers some state of the art alternatives to restructuring organisations and finally outlines some change agent roles and responsibilities for pursuing sustainability within organisations. Organisations around the world have been subjected to increasing pressure to improve their environmental performance. Much of the current research and debate has focused on practices and strategies that organisations and managers adopt to deal with ecological concerns (Hart, 1997; Hutchinson, 1996). However, there is a growing awareness about which structures assist organisations to enact these strategies (Hoffman, 2000), but there is a need (Starik, 1995b) for more research to examine the relationships between corporate structures and ecologically sustainable organisations (ESOs).