The Political Ecology of Automobile Recycling in Europe

Abstract

This paper addresses the relationship between organizations and the natural environment from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. In doing so, it contributes in three ways. First, it satisfies the need for more political perspectives in environment-related research. Second, by analyzing the end-of-life vehicle issue that the European automobile industry addressed in the 1990s, the paper satisfies the need of developing research that integrates organizational and field-level analysis. Finally, the use of the political ecology framework for the analysis of the end-of-life vehicle issue contributes to the development of a more politically charged institutional theory in which, as the study shows, both inertia and change in organizational fields depend on circuits of political ecology.