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Introduction
Concerns about effective management of the eco-system have intensified over the last decade ([21] Gray, 2010). From supranational agencies to political and corporate leaders, the preservation of the physical environment has increasingly occupied centre-stage and continues to engender considerable debates about how to tackle this seemingly mammoth task ([47] Porter and van der Linde, 1995; [16] Everett and Neu, 2000; [49] Rahaman et al. , 2004). One of the important considerations in the global attempts to preserve the eco-system has been the potential impact of such an endeavor on corporate financial performance ([37] Margolis and Walsh, 2003). This has spawned a growing literature that seeks to explore the relationship between corporate environmental performance and economic performance - a literature that is largely positivistic and has produced significant variations in empirical observations that have effectively muddled our understanding of the relationship between organizations and the wider environment they operate in (see [37] Margolis and Walsh, 2003, p. 278; for a prior attempt at reviewing this literature). Such scholarship has also produced unintended, yet serious consequences that tend to reinforce the "tension surrounding corporate responses to social misery" and at the same time leaves unexplored fundamental questions centring on how corporate entities navigate their way through these tensions. This lacuna reveals the poverty of not only the organizational studies literature but also to a lesser extent, the environmental accounting literature.
Drawing on a stakeholder theoretical perspective ([18] Freeman, 1984, [19] 1994; [14] Donaldson and Preston, 1995), this paper explores the environmental management strategies that an Australian energy company mobilizes in its pursuit of environmental excellence and how this impacts on both its economic and environmental performance. Through an in-depth interpretive case analysis, the paper presents a two-stage investigation of the company's attempt to manage environmental concerns while adhering to shareholder value maximization principles. In the first stage, we provide a descriptive account of the environmental management strategies that are enlisted in the company's attempts to preserve the eco-system, highlighting the motivations for such efforts. To achieve this objective, we focus on the forces underlying the evolutionary processes of the company over a decade (from 1995 to 2005). In the second stage, the paper explores how the researched organization internally controls, monitors, and instils discipline to ensure...