Market pull or legislative push: A framework for strategic ecological reorientation

Our understanding of how organizations become reoriented towards more environmentally apt strategies suffers from previously fragmented conceptual approaches and insufficient attention in research to the process and content of such ecological reorientations. This paper develops an orientational framework that systematizes different conceptualizations in the organizational, strategy and marketing literature and adds an ecological orientation. The framework is applied to an exploratory case study of an attempted reorientation towards a greener strategy in a household appliance firm. The minor ecological reorientation that occurred was found to be primarily driven by legislation rather than market pull owing to the dominant production orientation of the firm. Thus it is suggested here that the relative effectiveness of legislative push or market pull in achieving ecological reorientation varies according to the initial orientation of the firms.