Beyond the Dichotomy of Symbolic versus Substantive Actions: Evidence from Corporate Environmental Management

The symbolic management literature explores loose coupling between substantive and symbolic aspects of organizational activities. The prior literature, however, focuses on the benefits of symbolic management and tends to treat it as costless. If symbolic management is costless, presumably all firms should pursue it, yet in practice they do not. In this paper, we extend the theory of symbolic management to incorporate its costs as well as its benefits. We explore the gap between symbolic and substantive actions by creating a novel data set that combines information on claimed reductions with actual greenhouse gas emissions reductions calculated from fuel use data for the US electric utility industry. This approach goes beyond the implicit assumption of the complete decoupling of substantive and symbolic action made in prior work on symbolic management.