Curtiembres

Overcoming the Social and
Psychological Barriers to
Green Building

Organization & Environment
Volume 21 Number 4
December 2008 390-419
© 2008 Sage Publications
10.1177/1086026608326129
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Andrew J. Hoffman
Rebecca Henn
University of Michigan

The green building movement has overcome formidable, technical, and economichurdles in
recent years, yet adoption of green building practices within the design and construction field
remains low. Major corporations now offer products and services at a scale that is bringing
costs down to competitive levels, but environmental sustainability in building design and
delivery remains at the early stages of the adoption s-curve. This article argues that
environmental progressin the building design and construction industry will continue to stall
if the significant social and psychological barriers that remain are not addressed. After
surveying the three levels of barriers—individual, organizational, and institutional—the article
concludes with strategies for overcoming them. Seven specific strategies are elaborated,
namely, issue framing, targeting the rightdemographic, education, structural and incentive
change, indemnifying risk, green building standard improvements, and tax reform.
Keywords:

institutional theory; individual biases; corporate environmentalism; organizational
culture and structure; organizational and institutional change; organizational
innovation; built environment; LEED certification; green building movement;
sustainablebusiness.

I

n 2007, the law school of a large university announced plans to add a major new building
to its existing grounds. Student groups immediately lobbied for the building to achieve
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green
Building Council (USGBC). Despite previously successful campaigns with both business
and medical school buildings at theuniversity, law school administrators opposed the idea.
In meetings with students, university architects and administrators defended their resistance in several ways. They insisted that LEED was difficult to implement; the business case
did not support the added cost of LEED certification; LEED certification would cost an
additional “few hundred thousand dollars”; they were already developing“high-performance
buildings”; and finally, they feared setting a precedent that would require all future buildings
to be LEED certified.

Authors’ Note: The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Frederick A. and Barbara
M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, and the research support of
Erica Lardo. Correspondence concerningthis article should be addressed to Andrew J. Hoffman, University of
Michigan, 701 Tappan Street. W7718, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; e-mail: ajhoff@umich.edu.

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Students in the meeting had done significant research and found it difficultto concur
with these assertions. They pointed out that the medical school’s project was far more complex than the law school’s and yet was able to implement LEED. They explained that business school administrators originally opposed LEED certification based on financial
grounds but changed their minds when presented with data. The students presented costs
for LEED certification that were farless than administrators feared. Though high performance building was a good idea, they showed that LEED certification had credibility with a
skeptical public. And finally, the students suggested that a precedent on good building
design was a university’s responsibility. Yet resistance remained.
These students discovered what many others find as they propose the adoption of green
building...