Theorizing Collective Green Actions: An Institutional Perspective for the UAE Industries

The notion of “green” has gained increasing attention over the years. Many major companies have made significant attempt to better fit into the green concept. Are these corporate marketing endeavors purely based on their environmental consciousness or driven by their intention to gain social recognition which could in turn reshape their corporate image that better reflects the concerns of environments, climate change, and green IT issues? This question is interesting to explore because the complexity and difficulty of ‘green endeavor’ has been widely addressed among practitioners and researchers. Based on an institutional perspective, this paper thus proposes a theoretical framework that helps organizations analyze these green issues in the competitive marketplaces. Propositions of the framework theorize that organizations will inevitably face various isomorphic pressures that lead them to initiate or follow green actions collectively. Those isomorphic pressures usually stem from influential agencies or initiatives in their respective fields such as REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), the Green Grid, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and European Waste Catalogs (EWC). The implications of this theoretical framework suggest that organizations need to undertake green actions shiftily in order to continuously validate their competitive status in the global, networked economy. The cost of failing to do so, i.e. being ‘not’ green, might be beyond any organization’s measure in the long term. Further implications of collective green actions are made to the UAE local industries and research community.