Andrew Hoffman

Andrew (Andy) John Hoffman (born 1961) is a scholar of environmental issues and sustainable enterprise. He is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, with joint appointments at the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). He has also served as Faculty Director and Associate Director of the Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, and as Education Director at the Graham Sustainability Institute. Prior to the University of Michigan, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University and served on the faculty of the Boston University School of Management (now the Boston University Questrom School of Business).

Before entering academia, he worked as a compliance engineer for the US Environmental Protection Agency, Region 1; a project engineer for Metcalf & Eddy Consulting; a project superintendent for T&T Construction and Design, and; an analyst for the Amoco Pipeline Company.

Work and Life

Hoffman was born in Easton, Pennsylvania. His mother was Kathryn (née Hylind)^[1] and his father was Joseph Hoffman,^[2] a mechanical engineer. He has five brothers, one sister and thirteen nieces and nephews. He is married to Canadian journalist Joanne Will.

He grew up in Norwood Massachusetts, went to Norwood High School, earned his BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, his MS in Civil & Environmental Engineering from MIT, and his PhD in both Management and Civil & Environmental Engineering from MIT. For his PhD, he studied under John Ehrenfeld, Fred Moavenzadeh, David H. Marks, Willie Ocasio, William F. Pounds and Robert Thomas.

He has held visiting positions at the University of Victoria, INCAE Business School, Simon Fraser University, Harvard University Center for the Environment, University of Cambridge, MIT Sloan School of Management, Concordia University, Oxford University, University of St. Gallen, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), University of Cyprus and Reykjavik University. For the 2023-2024 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society at the Harvard Business School.^[3]

Research and Writing

Hoffman was trained as both a social and a physical scientist. The disciplinary focus of his research is devoted to theoretical questions surrounding institutional and cultural change; the empirical focus is directed towards the topic of sustainability, the natural environment, and climate change. The combination of the two foci provides a framework for both organization theory and environmental studies, bridging the worlds of theory and practice with research that is both rigorous for academic standards and relevant for both academics and practitioners. This work centers on several sub-themes.

Institutional Theory, Change and Power. His academic research uses a sociological perspective to understand the processes by which environmental issues both emerge and evolve as social, political and managerial issues, focusing on the expansion of institutional theory and the dynamics of organizational fields. How we view environmental issues is the product of how they are framed within the collective debate over what issues and events mean. This work informs key research concerns such as the sources of organization-level policies and practices, the dynamics of policy systems and wider organizational fields, and the institutional framing of the natural environment and its interplay within society and specific industrial sectors. More recent work has sought to construct a political variant of institutional theory, incorporating concerns for power, politics and non-human actors in the makeup and operation of organizational fields. As a composite, this work develops and tests arguments built from work in environmental sociology, contemporary theories of organizations and cultural approaches in social movement theory, as well as a growing critical literature on environmental management and corporate environmentalism.^{[4] [5]}

Market and Business Implications of Sustainability. At its root, issues like climate change and species extinction are the product of our market economy. As such, corporations find themselves struggling to understand the implications of the issue for their market strategy and non-market actors have sought to understand how to shift the market to address the issue. Hoffman’s work has sought to provide those answers, recognizing that changing the way we do business is essential to addressing the challenges of environmental degradation. The market is the most powerful institution on earth, and business is the most powerful entity within it. Business transcends national boundaries, and it possesses resources that exceed those of many nation-states. Business is responsible for producing the buildings we live and work in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the automobiles we drive, the energy that propels them, and the next form of mobility that will replace them. This does not mean that only business can generate solutions, but with its unmatched powers of ideation, production, and distribution, business is best positioned to bring the change we need at the scale we need it.^{[6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]}

Resistance to Climate Science. Hoffman’s work has sought to understanding why a social consensus has failed to emerge on climate change, focusing on the prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values that people possess; and then looks to the strong influence of the cultural referent groups and institutional environments of which they are a part. This can help explain why a majority of Democrats believe in climate change while a majority of Republicans do not. At its root, climate change has become a cultural issue within the United States. Physical scientists may set the parameters for understanding the technical aspects of the climate debate, but they do not have the final word on whether society accepts or even understands their conclusions. The constituency that is relevant in the social debate goes beyond scientific experts and the processes by which this constituency understands and assesses the science of climate change go far beyond its technical merits. This leads to a conclusion that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology.^{[13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]}

The Social Implications of the Anthropocene. According to physical scientists, climate change represents just one marker of a broader challenge, that we are living within what has been labeled “the Anthropocene,” a new geophysical epoch in which human activity is having a documentable influence on the fabric of the planet. Such a monumental shift in our physical reality will be accompanied by an equally monumental shift in our social reality since it is the system failures created by our organizational and institutional structures that are the cause of this new physical reality. We can begin to envision a social response, what is referred to as “Anthropocene Society,” as a new form of social structure that accepts and engages this new reality. Anthropocene Society refers to the human systems (social, economic, political, religious, etc.) that are a past cause, present consequence and future adaptation of our ecosystem changes. This new social reality represents an emergent awareness of a fundamental change in the intellectual, cultural and psychological conceptions of who we are as humans, what the “natural environment” is and how the two are related and inter-connected. Such possible future societies can be quite varied, ranging from dystopian to utopian. Hoffman’s research in this area seeks to explore social change processes and the potential scenarios and archetypes of what Anthropocene Society might look like and why.^[22]

Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse. One important area of Hoffman’s work has been an examination of the changing context of academia and the emergent role of the engaged scholar. There are multiple signals that academia is presently facing a crisis of relevance. While there are multiple reasons why this is happening, one that deserves particular attention is the extent to which academic scholars do not see it as their role to engage in public and political discourse. However, increased engagement is unavoidable in an emerging educational context where the caliber of public discourse has become degraded and social media is changing the nature of science and scientific discourse within society. Further, there is a demographic shift in play, where young scholars are seeking more impact from their work than their more senior colleagues.^{[23] [24] [25]}

Reinvigorating the Training of Future Business Leaders. Business schools in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are putting climate change more centrally into their curriculum. This is good news. The market is the world’s most powerful organizing institution, and it must be brought to bear on this monumental challenge. Indeed, if there are no solutions coming from the market, there will likely be no solutions. But there is also a problem. The guiding motivation behind this change is the scale of the market shift that climate change presents – as much as $26 trillion through 2030. In the face of such opportunity, the business curriculum is being geared towards the development of new products, services, and practices to realize profit opportunities. Yet that focus on the win-win ignores the eventual win-lose that must happen in some parts of the economy. Without the latter, the effort will not be enough. Climate change, in its truest sense, is a system breakdown. To fix a system breakdown, we need to fix the system that caused it: capitalism. This means that we must also fix both the research agenda and the curriculum and pedagogy within business schools. Faculty must be willing to change their notion of what it means to be a professor to accomplish this goal.^{[26] [27] [28] [29] [30]}

Hoffman has served on several committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, including America’s Climate Choices: Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change,^[31] the Sackler Colloquia on Science Communication,^[32] Climate Change Education: Preparing Future and Current Business Leaders and Contributions of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Towards Understanding Climate Change.^[33]

He has published eighteen books and over one-hundred articles and book chapters.

Teaching

His teaching includes courses on Strategies for Sustainable Development, which have been offered at the graduate and undergraduate levels, along with a specialized course on Strategies for Sustainable Development in Iceland. In 2017, this course won the Ideas Worth Teaching Award, from the Aspen Institute^[34] and in 2018, received an Honorable Mention from the Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula.^[35] He has taught a joint course between the Ross School of Business and Ford School of Public Policy called Business in Democracy: Advocacy, Lobbying and the Public Interest^[36] which won the Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula in 2019.^[37] His course called Management as a Calling was funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and helps students discern a vocation or calling in business that serves society.^{[38] [39] [40] [41]} His course Reexamining Capitalism examines the basic tenets of capitalism, helping business students understand its basic foundations, ways in which it has stayed true and deviated from those foundations, its variants around the world, and ways to amend and improve it to address the great challenges of the 21st century.^[42] His course Green Development was cross-listed offering between three schools – Business, Environment and Architecture – and won the Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula in 2009.^[43] Aside from these courses, Hoffman also teaches courses in Negotiations and Bargaining, and Managing Organizational Change.

Books

• Andrew J. Hoffman (2021) The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Winner of the 2022 Responsible Research in Business Management Award.^[44]
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2021) Management as a Calling: Leading Business, Serving Society, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Winner of the 2022 PROSE Book Award, from the Association of American Publishers^[45] and the 2022 SIM Best Book Award, from the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management.^[46] It was a finalist for the 2022 George R. Terry Book Award, from the Academy of Management.^[47] Translated into Chinese (使命管理, China Science and Technology Press).
• Andrew J. Hoffman and P. Devereaux Jennings (2018) Re-engaging with Sustainability in the Anthropocene Era: An Institutional Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Winner of the 2019 SIM Best Book Award from the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management.^[48]
• Andrew J. Hoffman and Susse Georg (2018) Business and the Natural Environment: A Research Overview (Oxford, UK: Routledge).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2016) Finding Purpose: Environmental Stewardship as a Personal Calling, (Leeds, UK: Greenleaf Publishing).
• Andrew J. Hoffman, Kirsti Ashworth, Chase Dwelle, Peter Goldberg, Andrew Henderson, Louis Merlin, Yulia Muzyrya, Norma-Jean Simon, Veronica Taylor, Corinne Weisheit, and Sarah Wilson (2015) Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse: Proceedings of the Michigan Meeting (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2015) How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Winner of the 2019 Responsible Research in Business Management Award.^[49] Translated into Czech (Jak kultura utváří diskusi o klimatické změně, Muni Press).
• John Ehrenfeld and Andrew J. Hoffman (2013) Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Finalist for the 2014 SIM Best Book Award, from the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management.
• Rebecca Henn and Andrew J. Hoffman (eds.) (2013) Constructing Green: The Social Structures of Sustainability (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
• Susse Georg and Andrew J. Hoffman (eds.) (2013) Business and the Environment: Critical Perspectives in Business and Management, Volumes I-IV, (Oxford, UK: Routledge).
• Pratima Bansal and Andrew J. Hoffman (eds.) (2012) The Oxford Handbook on Business and the Natural Environment (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2010) Builder’s Apprentice: A Memoir (Ann Arbor, MI: Huron River Press). Winner of the 2011 Connecticut Book Award^[50] and a finalist for the 2010 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Award.^[51]
• Andrew J. Hoffman and John Woody (2008) Memo to the CEO: Climate Change, What’s Your Business Strategy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press). Translated into Chinese (必看！绿色战略中的商机, China Machine Press), Danish (Klimaforandring - Hvad er din forretningsstrategi?, Gyldendal), Portuguese/Brazil (Mudanças Climáticas: Desafios e Oportunidades Empresariais, Elsevier) and Portuguese/Portugal (Alterações Climáticas, Actual Editoras).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2007) Carbon Strategies: How Leading Companies are Reducing their Climate Change Footprint (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press). Translated into Korean (십년 후 기업의 순위를 뒤바꿀 탄소전략, Tendedero).
• Andrew J. Hoffman and Marc Ventresca (eds.) (2002) Organizations, Policy and the Natural Environment: Institutional and Strategic Perspectives (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2001) From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Winner of the 2001 Rachel Carson Prize, from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (2000) Competitive Environmental Strategy: A Guide to the Changing Business Landscape, (Washington DC: Island Press).
• Andrew J. Hoffman (ed.) (1998) Global Climate Change: A Senior Level Dialogue at the Intersection of Economics, Strategy, Technology, Science, Politics and International Negotiation, (Washington DC: Rowman & Littlefield).

Awards and Honors

In addition to his research, writing and teaching awards above, the Aspen Institute awarded Hoffman the Faculty Pioneer Award in 2016^[52] and the Rising Star Award in 2003. The Organizations and Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management awarded him the Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020, Distinguished Faculty Award in 2018 and Distinguished Service Award in 2013. In 2009, he was selected as the All-Academy Chair for the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. The American Chemical Society named him a National Award Winner in 2016. The Ross School of Business Awarded him the Victor L. Bernard Teaching Leadership Award in 2023.^[53] Boston University awarded him the Broderick Prize for Service in 2003. In 1995, MIT awarded him the Klegerman Award for Environmental Excellence. From 2011-2012 he was an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow at Stanford University. His research articles won the Best SO!apbox Essay Award Winner from Strategic Organization in 2016;^[54] the Best Paper Award from Organization & Environment in 2014;^[55] the Maggie Award for Best Feature Article in a trade journal from the Western Publishing Association in 2013; the Breaking the Frame Award Winner from the Journal of Management Inquiry in 2012 (with P.D. Jennings); and was a finalist for the Best Paper of the Year Award from Academy of Management Review in 2003 (with K. Wade-Benzoni, L. Thompson, D. Moore, J. Gillespie and M. Bazerman).

References

External links

• Personal Webpage
• University of Michigan bio
• Harvard Business School bio
• Google Scholar page
• Social Science Research Network page
• ORCID page
• Impactstory page
• Web of Science page
• Scopus page
• LinkedIn page
• X page
• Amazon Author page