Past, Present, or Future? Managers' Temporal Orientations and Corporate Climate Action in the Swedish Electricity Sector

Journal article, 2014

Existing research shows that corporate climate actions are the result of public policies and a limited range of other factors that can influence business strategy. Managers are depicted as lacking agency in that they passively adhere to "drivers" of climate actions, with little room for autonomy. This study takes issue with such a view by examining agency vis-a-vis managers' temporal orientations. In particular, we seek to examine why managers adopt certain temporal orientations and not others in the context of the climate issue and Swedish electricity production. We find that whilst managers are predominantly focused on future policy developments, they also deliberate over, reconstruct, and in some cases actively refute other pressures for climate action that were borne in the past, feature in the present, and which relate to alternative future projections. We further examine reasons for such behaviour.