Environmental managers and institutional work: reconciling tensions of competing institutional logics

Firms are subjected to competing institutional logics, and a key concern is how these institutional logics are managed at the firm level. Two contentious logics facing the firms are that of the market and the natural environment. Focusing on firms’ environmental managers and drawing on institutional work we ask what is the nature of the institutional work done by environmental managers in managing the competing institutional logics of the market and the environment, and does the nature of this work change in response to exogenous shocks? We draw on repeated-interviews with 55 environmental managers in 2006 and 2008, and fin d that environmental managers draw on different permutations of creation, maintenance and disruption to bridge the market and the environmental logic at the firm level. Our findings brings nuance to the categories of institutional work, and shows that seemingly institutionally embedded practices are not always resilient to exogenous shocks.