Organizations and the Natural Environment: Thirty-Five Years of Research on Business and the Natural Environment. Part 2: The 75 Seminal Articles of the Field

Organizations and the Natural Environment: Thirty-Five Years of Research on Business and the Natural Environment. Part 2: The 75 Seminal Articles of the Field

I then collected citation counts (as a measure of influence) for every article using Googlescholar (again, ISI and Scopus did not list all the articles in the sample).  Articles were then sorted along two criteria: absolute citation counts and normalized citation counts by year.  The first measures the overall impact of the article.  The second takes into account the fact that older articles will gather more citations than more recent articles.  

Table 1 offers a list of the 75 most highly cited articles in Business and the Natural Environment ranked by normalized citations per year.  Those articles with a higher normalized rank than absolute rank may be considered to be up and coming articles relative to their peer set (presuming their citation trend continues).  Those articles with a higher absolute rank than normalized rank may be considered to be sun setting in influence relative to their peer set.  Ideally, one would also develop a measure for the yearly trends in citation counts to observe if an article is declining in influence.  

Immediately, readers may quibble over what constitutes an article in B&NE.  The first article appeared in Nature in 1997 and caused quite a stir when the 13 authors analyzed 17 ecosystem services and determined a value for nature estimated at between $16 and $54 trillion per year, with a likely figure of at least $33 trillion.  This is followed by more commonly cited B&NE journals (likeAcademy of Management Review, Organization Studies and Administrative Science Quarterly).  Remaining near the top of the list are seemingly classic articles on the topic by Michael Porter and Milton Friedman.  

As you peruse the list, you will be hard pressed to find articles from the fields of finance and information technology, notably low in B&NE coverage.  You will also be hard pressed to find articles from Business Strategy & the Environment, theJournal of Industrial Ecology or Organization & Environment, three specialized journals that feature a lot of B&NE research as measured by number of articles.  

Again, I offer this list and these questions merely as provocations for further discussion over the state of the field of Business and the Natural Environment.  I offer the same limitations of this list as I offered in the tables in Part 1.  Does this list of 874 articles offer a fair representation of the field? Can we compare citation counts between multiple disciplines (i.e. engineering, economics and management) in any absolute way? And, how do overall citation counts differ from citation counts within the field of B&NE? In terms of the creation of a B&NE field, how do we capture the common streams of discourse?  And is there even one stream of research represented by these articles?  Are we even talking to each other?