Making sense of greening and organizational change

This paper focuses on the greening of organizations as a process. It offers an account of how the environment is enacted within an organization, and explores how the personal and social meanings of ‘the environment’ arise in the context of behaviour. The paper presents a case study of the introduction of environmental reporting or green accounting in a public hospital in Denmark, and highlights how hospital managers made sense of this new task and made green accounting perform in the context of their everyday work situation. In doing so, emphasis is given to the emotional aspects of greening, and to how this shapes different actions. Greening is viewed as a sense-making process, in which the organizational members' individual and collective identity is gradually transformed. Based on case findings, the paper discusses how organizing for the environment cannot be separated from the emotional subtexts of the organizational members and the other currents of organizational life.