by Reinhard Pfriem

The "ecological corporate management" project continues to be viewed critically - from both the left and the right. From the left, because companies and entrepreneurs are still not trusted to think seriously about anything other than so-called profit maximisation. From the right, because safeguarding Germany as a business location (a nationalistic platitude when examined seriously) supposedly requires reducing corporate environmental protection to a minimum. This article attempts to provide historical and political clarification against two overly simplistic world views that are perhaps less opposed than they appear.

Carl von Ossietzky University was and is regarded as a reform university, which, in addition to the question of how far the associated claims (still) have validity, is reminiscent of the socio-political background of its founding period: The phase from 1967/68 to the mid-1970s in the West German Federal Republic was characterised, among other things, by a renaissance of such socio-theoretical and socio-political ideas in which the commercially oriented companies and entrepreneurs functioned as the main source of social evil.

In the meantime, it is worth remembering the political roots and characteristics of what developed in the second half of the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany as an environmental protection movement and, after a number of years, led to the formation of the Green Party, among others. Against the backdrop of numerous demonstrations against the accelerated expansion of nuclear energy use under the Federal Chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt, including those that were banned despite six-figure attendance, it should not be forgotten that 20 years ago a broad environmental protection movement developed in this country as the rather precise opposite of corporate environmental management: it was about nothing less than the attempt to throw sand in the gears of an increasingly questionable development and use of modern technologies, of which nuclear energy was only a particularly prominent example. This was essentially the ecological supplementation and expansion of existing anti-capitalist social criticism in the social sphere. It was (and still is, from today's perspective) remarkable that during these years, in contrast to the '68 movement, which essentially stuck to negative social criticism, ideas about concrete utopias and alternatives in individual social and technical areas were increasingly developed.

Those who, for example, wasted DM 6 billion in Kalkar by not completing the construction of the fast breeder reactor (of course without later apologising in any way for such bad planning), were the natural opponents of what acted as an environmental protection movement. At that time, the fronts were still clear; the later Jülich research centre was still called the Jülich Nuclear Research Facility.

Political communication in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the relevant debates, not only in connection with the formation of the Green Party, soon led to the realisation that this supposed ecological extension of the left-wing and anti-capitalist project of social change was a self-deception. It did not help much to cite isolated quotations from Marx in order to distract from the fact that - as Marx and Engels had already precisely described in the Communist Manifesto - the theories orientated towards Marx and socialism were essentially permeated by the idea that capitalist technology should be developed and accelerated, so to speak, so that it could later be put at the service of the working class, the labourers or whatever it was called. And after all, quite a few active representatives of the left-wing and anti-capitalist project of social change had referred to alleged socialist or communist alternatives of Chinese, Soviet or whatever provenance, i.e. countries that denounced criticism of the use of nuclear energy as a particular problem of Western capitalist conditions.

In the 1970s, there were indeed a number of environmental protection laws in the West German Federal Republic, and in 1971, in implementation of the government declaration of 1969, a West German government announced an environmental programme with systematic demands for the first time. In business, however, environmental protection continued to be communicated as a risk factor, and in 1977, after the two economists Erich Hödl and Werner Meissner had presented the macroeconomic benefits of active environmental protection in a study, the Federation of German Industries (BDI) commissioned a study from the IFO Institute in Munich with the intention of proving the opposite. In other words (even if German business organisations no longer like to hear this today): The business community found environmental protection extraordinarily difficult at the time.

The 1980s then brought radical changes. On the political stage, the transition from Schmidt to Kohl was not exactly an expression of increased courage for political innovation, and the Minister of the Interior, who was still responsible for environmental protection at the time, was called Friedrich Zimmermann and opposed all ecological criticism of a section of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal in order to emphasise how beautiful this project was. There were certainly rumblings in society, and the peace movement of the time certainly played its part in eroding the mission statement that competitive toughness and technology fetishism were guarantees of positive social development.

It would be pointless, and not only at this point, to mystify the so-called '68 generation in a positive way (as wrong, indeed nonsensical, as the negative mystification that has repeatedly been favoured in the recent past is). In any case, the fact is that in small and medium-sized companies in particular, many of those who had completed their studies in the post-Adenauer era moved into management positions at the beginning of the 1980s. Their corporate and socio-political skills as well as their values and norms differed significantly from the generation of entrepreneurs who, together with the rest of the population in Germany in the 1950s, had pursued the equally mystified project of reconstruction. In retrospect, it was probably no coincidence that in 1984 an ecology commission of the Federal Association of Young Entrepreneurs (BJU), an organisation that brings together people under 40 who both hold shares in a company and are involved in its management, presented the first checklist for corporate environmental protection. This ecology commission was the nucleus for the subsequent founding of two ecologically orientated business associations: the Bundesdeutscher Arbeitskreis Umweltbewußtes Management (B.A.U.M.) and the Förderkreis Umwelt - future.

Academic Business Administration remained largely untouched by ecological issues for several years; Strebel's monograph on the environment and business administration, published as early as 1980, remained the only publication in the inner circle of the guild until 1988 that could rightly make systematic claims. Nevertheless, activities in the field of company-related environmental research were expanded in these years, i.e. 1984 ff., not least via the Berlin Federal Environment Agency, which was founded in response to the Chernobyl reactor disaster as a downstream agency of the now independent Ministry of the Environment.

The activities of B.A.U.M. and future in their early years cannot be overestimated. Numerous conferences and journalistic activities in the field of tension between business, administration and science prepared the ground for the Federal Association of German Industry and the various industry and employers' associations to follow suit. Particularly noteworthy here is the conference at the Protestant Academy in Tutzing in 1987, at which the then BDI President Tyll Necker gave the keynote speech and a Tutzing Declaration on Environmentally Oriented Corporate Management was adopted.

This Tutzing conference was also a special milestone on the way to breaking with the old, seemingly clear-cut fronts: here the environmentally destructive capitalists, there the anti-capitalist environmentalists. The dialogues that often took place for the first time in these years between people who had previously only seen themselves on opposing sides were and remain an essential prerequisite for finding answers to the ecological challenge in a modern society that is characterised by power and interests, but is also highly complex and cannot be reduced to a simple dualism.

In 1988, German Business Administration began to take up this ecological challenge almost like a torrent. From that year onwards, so many books and other publications were produced on topics such as environmental management, business environmental economics and ecological corporate management that, in retrospect, the observer must get the impression that many wanted to make up for what they had neglected to do in previous years through excessive activity. In the meantime, the finding that much more has been written here than has been thoroughly read and processed applies in particular to this subject area, which is also true for other scientific fields.

From "Life Cycle Assessment to Eco-Controlling" was the title of a conference held at the Düsseldorf Trade Fair Centre at the end of the first German model project for the introduction of an ecological corporate policy in an industrial company by the packaging film manufacturer Bischof + Klein in Lengerich, Westphalia, where Klaus Günther, who had initiated the founding of the Förderkreis Umwelt - future, was Managing Director at the time. With a great deal of political and financial support at the end of the 1980s, a whole series of German companies, and a pleasingly growing number in those years, set out on the path to ecological corporate management, whereby the understanding of what this meant was naturally very different - and still is today. Characteristic of this still ongoing phase of corporate environmental policy and management activities is the breaking down of the "yes" to corporate environmental protection to the individual functional and responsibility areas of the company. These attempts have led to completely different forms. For example, the organisational interpretation ranges from the mandatory appointment of company officers for emission control or waste, as required by various environmental policy sub-laws, to separate environmental protection officers integrating this corporate policy task area, to direct continuous commitment at management level. And companies have tried and continue to try in very different ways and to very different degrees to integrate corporate environmental protection into the individual functional areas from procurement to production and marketing.

At this point, it should be noted that the exponential increase in unemployment, the renewed spread of poverty in Germany and, in particular, the problems resulting from German reunification have pushed environmental protection into the background as an explosive socio-political issue in recent years. However, there is another important reason for the obvious tendencies towards stagnation and/or even regression in corporate environmental policy, for example the significant step taken by Volkswagen AG not only to let Mr Steger go involuntarily, but also to dissolve the function of the environmental board as such: the need for a transition from a first to a second phase of ecological corporate policy.

The first phase of corporate environmental policy was and still is characterised by the fact that (a) economically, cost-cutting effects in particular are perceived, where, for example, energy savings or the closing of material cycles promise both economic and ecological advantages; that (b) technical measures are taken with which production processes and, to some extent, products are ecologically optimised without questioning the product and production as such. The most glaring example of this is, of course, the automotive industry, in which, on the one hand, there is more talk and now more action than ever before about the ecological optimisation of cars, while, on the other hand, the only manager in the industry who is vocally critical of products and thinks about the future (Daniel Gouedevert) had to resign, first from Ford and then from VW; and (c) in organisational terms, the first phase means that operational environmental protection is essentially regulated by the allocation of corresponding special functions.

The second phase of corporate environmental policy is fundamentally different. Here it is (a) economically a matter of achieving economic advantages not only through the rationalisation-related variant of the economic principle, i.e. cost reduction, but above all of perceiving possible profit factors and success potentials of the future. Furthermore, it is (b) technically or beyond technology, about perceiving one's own company in its social function in the long term, organising the satisfaction of society's needs in a certain area in the best possible way through appropriate and sustainable products and services. In this sense, the late Austrian systems theorist Erich Jantsch spoke of function-orientated corporate policy ("Products come and go, functions remain"). And (c) from an organisational point of view, we should not go down the path of assigning responsibility for corporate environmental protection along the lines of "We have someone to do it and therefore no longer need to worry about it ourselves", but rather the company-specific question of how the company as a social whole can become an ecological actor. In this context, reference should be made to the project that the Oldenburg-based company ecco GmbH has carried out on behalf of the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) with eleven pioneering ecological companies and has just completed. With reference to the distinction between the two phases of ecological corporate policy cited above, it was found that even these ecological pioneers (including such prominent companies as Wilkhahn/Bad Münder, Siemens-Nixdorf, merkle ratiopharm, Märkisches Landbrot, etc.) have major problems in the transition from the first to the second phase. For us, the main consequence of this was and is to intensify the company's internal and external communication about how a company that sees itself as a spiritual and cultural unit and as capable of learning in principle can adopt the contents of the second phase of ecological corporate policy more quickly and better. This cannot be achieved through quasi-technical, implementation-orientated measures, but requires a great deal of work in the so-called soft factors of corporate management, which include the ability to set goals and visions, endogenous innovation potential, problem-related communication skills and the like.

This is the title of a post-doctoral thesis that Mr Schneidewind submitted a few weeks ago to the Department of Business Administration at the University of St. Gallen. In terms of its political approach, this title announces the opposite of the basic conception of the 1970s cited at the beginning: companies and entrepreneurs are no longer to be understood as the source of all social and then also ecological misery - maintaining such a conception is nothing other than maintaining overly simplistic views of the world, but the economy is an important system of actors among those who - if at all - can counter the ecological crisis, i.e. the crisis in society's treatment of the natural environment and thus our living conditions. Theoretically, this approach requires (this can only be hinted at here) a fundamental departure from the economic model of behaviour, according to which companies are essentially presented as optimisers and adaptors under given framework conditions. However, this economic behavioural model is still not only dominant in academic economics, but also essentially shapes the so-called common sense that exists in real life, according to which economic activity is merely an area of purposeful rational action.

We are the society in which we live, as Doris Lessing once put it. In this respect, it is not a matter of desperate dreams against some supposed course of history when, from today's perspective, the review set out here expresses a very fundamental yes to the social field of action and experimentation of ecological corporate policy. This project is at least no more improbable than many other things that are brought into the world, and nobody would do well to shift the responsibility for the failure of this project onto others.

The author

Prof. Dr Reinhard Pfriem (48) has been teaching and researching as a business economist specialising in corporate management and corporate environmental policy at the University of Oldenburg since 1991. Pfriem studied philosophy and politics in Berlin and economics in Bochum. After his studies and doctorate, he became managing director of the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) in Berlin, which he co-founded. This year, he received the 1996 Environmental Award of the "Bundesdeutscher Arbeitskreis für Umweltbewußtes Management" (B.A.U.M.) for his pioneering scientific achievements in this field.