Sustainability Governance Across Time and Space: Connecting Environmental Stewardship in the Firm with the Global Community

To differentiate ecosystem management, three models of firm-level environmental stewardship are paired with three types of trust, which serve as informal governance mechanisms. The interconnectedness of organizational fields and the influence of intertemporality and interspatiality (time and space) are key dynamics in developing decentralized networks as an approach for linking firms, organizational fields, and global sustainability efforts. Interviews with 18 firms, government agencies, and nonprofit-making organizations from Japan and the USA are utilized to discuss the key concepts in the paper. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.