Using environmental paradigms to understand and change an organization’s response to stakeholders

A model is developed which allows an organization to assess its environmental perception and how that perception may impact its response to stakeholders. The model differentiates an organization’s socioecological responsibility across four dimensions for placement on Colby’s five‐paradigm continuum, which ranges between the frontier economic paradigm and new ecological paradigm. This article provides a useful means of assessing the ecological paradigm utilized by firms and offers criteria that may assist the organization in developing a competitively valuable environmental stance.