Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

56 Chapter 2
that the introduction of these new organisational routines has not been
accompanied by shifts in power (changing and new coalitions) or changes in
values. Dieleman (1999) also focuses on change processes in companies, and
specifically addresses the question why companies seem to be captured in a
trajectory of cleaning up pollution and cannot easily make the change to
prevention and process integrated solutions. He explains this by elaborating
how a certain way of doing things has become institutionalised in the past 30
years in problem approaches, laws and regulations, education and
technology, standard solutions and so forth (Dieleman, 1999: 200). His focus
is on cleaner production projects as a way to undermine this existing ‘arena’.
“Because an arena has the character of a ‘seamless web’ with numerous
interwoven alignments and connections, change that is fundamental in
several ways demands changes of all actors involved” (Dieleman, 1999: 200,
my translation). The framework he develops for analysing and explaining
change processes in companies is based on insights from technology studies,
institutional economics and evolutionary theorizing. Firms have developed
certain blindness, a way of viewing problems and solutions in one particular
way, which hampers prevention of pollution as firms tend not to see the
opportunities available. Also, when regarding alternative solutions, these are
difficult to implement due to path dependencies, as existing functional and
structural connections (e.g. with the regulatory setting and knowledge
infrastructure) are not geared to this type of change. He concludes that
change processes rely on confrontation (unpacking blindness, make it
visible, and confronting actors with other problem approaches and problem
solving), reflection (analysing linkages between various levels that create
path dependencies, such as the relationship between a firms’ accumulated
competencies and the knowledge infrastructure), and experimenting and
learning (through trial and error, opportunities and their frontiers can be
assessed in a process of learning by doing, using and interacting). A partial
explanation lies in the composition of the networks of the cleaner production
projects which were not designed from the perspective of stimulating
confrontation, and in firms’ wider context (e.g. regulatory environment;
intermediaries; knowledge infrastructure) which was not geared towards
stimulating prevention, had it roots mainly in the trajectory of cleaning up
pollution (e.g. pollution control instead of pollution prevention). The
observation of Boons et al. (2000) that the more top-down oriented approach
of stimulating environmental management dominated the more bottom-up
oriented pollution prevention approach is also very relevant. The
environmental management approach is much more oriented towards
providing environment relevant information and much less on redesigning
and improving production processes and products. In that sense it fitted
better to the regulation approach, policy style, competencies and routines of