New Horizons in Research on Sustainable Organisations

Emerging Ideas, Approaches and Tools for Practitioners and Researchers

Mark Starik, Sanjay Sharma, Carolyn Egri, Rick Bunch

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781874719779
• eBook ISBN: 9781351281065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Environmental sustainability practice and research have advanced over the past decade from novelty to near-mainstream status today. During this environmentally critical time period, sustainability practitioner techniques, such as environmental, energy and social auditing, other sustainability information and related systems, and a wide variety of environmental sustainability approaches have been developed, improved and institutionalised, advancing both the practice and research of environmental sustainability management and policy. However, academics and practitioners in the sustainability field still have widely differing perspectives on what a sustainable organisation is or might be, but seldom take the opportunity to share these respective sustainability visions, let alone the multiple ways to achieve them. New Horizons in Research on Sustainable Organisations is intended to bridge this gap between academics and practitioners with cutting-edge research from both groups on progress towards sustainability.

After working on sustainability-related projects involving other academics, both research- and practitioner-oriented graduate students, consultants, managers and activists, the lead co-editors of this volume saw the need to encourage information exchanges among differing networks of sustainability stakeholders to create a pathway for researchers and practitioners in the general area of organisations and the natural environment to address issues of common interest. There are many networks in the general subject area, but the cross-pollination of ideas between academics and practitioners remains sketchy. New Horizons in Research on Sustainable Organisations is intended to present and encourage such cross-pollination.

The chapters in this volume are presented in three subsets, generally proceeding from the most "macro" to the most "micro" in terms of perspective and applicability. However, this arbitrary division belies the integration from macro through meso (or mid-range) to micro levels that is apparent in these studies. Macro approaches typically include wider geographic scopes, greater numbers of stakeholders, and more complex explanatory factors than micro approaches. Each chapter adopts one or more particular sustainability world-view and then grounds these and the other chapter elements within actual organisations. Therefore, the reader is advised to envision not a one-dimensional continuum but rather a circle in which the macro view both feeds back and feeds forward to the micro view.

This volume addresses a number of intriguing and important sustainable organisation phenomena such as multiple sustainable development perspectives, changing environmental politics, environmental management systems variations, voluntary environmental programme performance, complex adaptive systems, and environmental technology development. Additionally, several models are suggested, such as cultivation, capabilities and business ecology frameworks.

1
Views of sustainable development

A Typology of Stakeholders' Conflicting Perspectives

Robert Boutilier
Simon Fraser University, Canada

One of the frustrations of a stakeholder-oriented approach to managing for sustainable development is that stakeholders disagree with one another about what sustainable development means. Workers in Chilean copper mines want to sustain the development of their communities with mining-related jobs while eco-activists in the UK want to reduce global mining in order to preserve finite resources for future generations. Both groups can claim that the principles of sustainable development justify their positions. What can a stakeholder-oriented company do when its stakeholders cannot agree?

The concept of sustainable development acquired an international profile in business and policy circles with the publication of the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987), also known as the Brundtland Commission report. At the most abstract conceptual level, the principles enunciated by the WCED can be summarised and simplified as portraying sustainable development as whatever contributes to the balanced endurance of a set of three relationships. The first relationship is between humankind and the environment. The second is between the present generation and future generations. The third is among present generations in different parts of the world or different global social classes (for example, the rich and the poor). The second and third principles specify that the humankind–environment relationship must be sustainable for all and for the future.

Since the Brundtland Commission report, the concept of sustainable development has been appropriated by many different movements. Each one highlights a new application of the principles and promotes a course of action to achieve sustainable development. For companies, the interpretations and expectations surrounding the term ‘sustainable development’ become more numerous each year. A multitude of corporate social and environmental performance monitoring and rating systems have been developed to spell out the concept in concrete, actionbased detail (IISD 2003; Leipziger 2003). These systems, however, tend to reflect only some of the interpretations and actions that stakeholders advocate in the name of sustainable development. They often neglect the perspectives of stakeholders in developing countries who want equal access to the freedom and material prosperity that they see Westerners, including Western environmentalists and eco-tourists, enjoying.

The requirement that sustainable development applies equally for the benefit of the world’s ‘have-nots’ as well as ‘haves’ places a particularly heavy responsibility on today’s international businesses. As national economies have become enmeshed in a global economy, corporations have begun to struggle with the meaning and implications of sustainable development for their operations in the rest of the world. In the developed countries of the North, sustainable development includes a strong focus on consumer issues (Cowe and Williams 2000). In the developing countries of the South, producer issues are more predominant. In the global minerals sector, for example, the developed Northern countries are concentrated among those with the highest per capita levels of mineral consumption. Less developed Southern countries and former Soviet bloc countries are concentrated among those with the highest per capita production (MMSD 2002: 45-48). Because of the diverse socioeconomic locales in which they operate, internationally active corporations must understand sustainability issues at the humankind–environment interface from the multiple perspectives of different societies at different levels of economic development.

Internationally active corporations have stakeholders around the world. Those stakeholders live in diverse socioeconomic and political conditions. This contributes to diversity in stakeholders’ interests in their respective relationships with the natural environment. Consequently, when dealing with these diverse interests, international corporations often encounter conflicts, paradoxes and dilemmas. Stakeholders from societies at different levels of development often urge the company to take diametrically opposed courses of action on matters that at least some of the stakeholders portray as sustainable development issues. When stakeholders disagree with one another about how the human–environment interface should be managed, corporations need a framework that translates the concept of sustainable development across the all-too-often narrow and partial perspectives held both by their own managers and by diverse stakeholders in subsistence, industrialising and post-industrial economies. This chapter presents a typology of sustainable development perspectives and shows how they can either conflict with, or align with, one another. Distinct versions of the ideal interface between humans and the natural environment are outlined and then used to unravel the misapprehensions and misgivings that companies encounter when trying to apply the concept of sustainable development.

Modernisation and postmodernisation

The typology proposed here is based on two well-accepted propositions and on one that is new. The first proposition is that different perceptions of sustainability reflect differing views of the human relationship with nature. The second is that at the root of the differing views of the human–environment relationship are differences in socioeconomic, sociopolitical and ecological contexts. The new proposition is that these contexts are best described by Inglehart’s (1997) tripartite typology of societies and social values. After briefly describing Inglehart’s three groupings (traditional, modern, postmodern), I map Castells’s (1997) typology of environmental movements and their associated views onto the Inglehart typology of societies.

In the process, I propose three extensions. First, I add a type of environmental group neglected by Castells. Second, I create a link between Inglehart’s two endpoints, thereby defining a new process in societal evolution that I call ‘neotribalisation’. Third, I use both Inglehart’s empirical findings and Castells’s theoretical analysis to construct six distinct views of sustainable development, each corresponding with either a type of society, or a type of transition between two types of societies (i.e. modernisation, postmodernisation and neotribalisation). These six views are illustrated with an example from a developing-country mining project. Finally, I show how this typology can help companies anticipate how the views of various stakeholders will be congruent or contradictory with respect to what constitutes sustainable development.

B fore discussing Inglehart’s typology of societies, it should be noted that one of them, the modern society, is a longstanding field of study (Giddens 1991; Harrison 1988). Since the time of Marx (1965), Durkheim (1893/1984), and Weber (1958, 1983), theorists have speculated about the values that produce, and are produced by, the macro-societal process of modernisation. Despite this, the distinction between modern and postmodern views of sustainability remains unclear. Ecological modernisation theory (EMT) (Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000; Mol and Spaargaren 2000) supposedly derives its name from the application of modern themes to environmental issues, but actually contains a mix of modern and postmodern themes. Mol and Sonnenfeld (2000) identified the major themes of EMT. First, science and technology are seen as helpful in solving environmental problems. Second, market dynamics are deemed to have a role to play in restructuring society in a more sustainable way. Third, private and civic-sector arrangements are seen as increasingly important in creating effective de facto regulations relative to the legislation of nation-states. Fourth, environmental social movements are observed to play an increasingly participative role in social change, as opposed to a role giving voice to calls for the complete restructuring of society. Fifth, EMT eschews the complete neglect of either environmental or economic interests in favour of intergenerational solidarity in dealing with the interaction of the two.

Despite its name and its respect for rationality, EMT should not be mistaken for a perspective that assumes or celebrates modern phenomena such as Weberian bureaucracies or Fordist principles of industrial production. Mol and Spaargaren (2000: 26) distinguish EMT from ‘green postmodernity’ while acknowledging that EMT has been elaborated since its inception in the 1980s to accommodate postmodern and other critiques. Indeed, Mol and Sonnenfeld’s third and fourth themes accord with postmodern themes of deconstructed authority and participative social constructionism. Moreover, Cohen (2000: 78) cites Jänicke (1985) and Simonis (1988) as authors who view the use of science and technology to solve environmental problems as a third stage of social organisation that arises after modernity. Pre-modern societal organisation is portrayed as agriculturally based. Modern society is seen as organised around industrial production. Finally, in ecological modernity, science and technology correct the problems of the transitional modern period. Because it has these diverse elements, EMT seems to inhabit the contested terrain between the modern and the postmodern.

EMT’s perspective on sustainability invokes dimensions that differentiate modernity from postmodernity. This is likely to be a reflection of broader debates in Western societies. Mol and Spaargaren (2000) acknowledge that EMT was developed on an empirical base limited to Western European countries. They call for more international studies in order to broaden its applicability because it is not yet clear how applicable EMT concepts would be in subsistence developing-world contexts. Internationally active corporations need a perspective that is based on broader, global data.

The World Values Survey (WVS) provides one of the most global perspectives on values and attitudes available to date. Inglehart used WVS data to confirm empirically the existence of three categories of societal values, namely, the traditional, the modern and the postmodern. The WVS is a multinational project being conducted by researchers around the world. The data that Inglehart reported on in 1997 came from the 1981–84 and 1990–91 waves of WVS data collection. It sampled over 55,000 respondents in 43 countries representing 70% of the world’s population. Inglehart described the differences among three economic and political systems on three dimensions: authority; economy; and values. Societies dominated by traditional values combine the steady-state economics of subsistence agriculture with an all-pervasive tribal and religious authority. They hold religious and communal values. Societies dominated by modern values combine a dynamic industrial economy with the authority of a rational–legal nation-state. Their values highlight achievement motivation and the disciplined drive for material success. Societies with a high proportion of people subscribing to postmodern values combine the post-industrial economics of information-and service-based work with the authority of participatory democracy, global governance networks and autonomous ethical decision-making. They value tolerance, self-expression, trust and individual rights. Inglehart did not find any societies that were dominated by postmodern values, but the Scandinavian countries came closest. Even though a society might be dominated by one set of values, other value orientations co-exist within it. For the sake of convenience, I will refer to these three categories as ‘types of societies’ with the understanding that the categorisation is based on the relative preponderance of the designated value set.

The movement from traditional to modern values is part of the process of modernisation. The movement from modern values to postmodern values is called postmodernisation (Harvey 1990; Jameson 1991; McGowan 1991). Postmodernisation occurs when societies cross a certain threshold of affluence such that scarcity of life’s necessities no longer dominates daily decision-making (Inglehart 1997, 2000). Inglehart estimates this threshold to be approximately at the level of affluence experienced in countries such as Taiwan and Ireland in the early 1990s. In terms of politics, postmodern societies move away from deference to authority (Nevitte 1996) and the politics of class-based economic interests towards decentralised, participatory governance and identity politics (Melucci 1985, 1989). Quality-of-life issues take precedence over survival issues, as evidenced by the rise of social movements such as gay rights, feminism and environmentalism.

Traditional societies undoubtedly appeared first. Modern societies were layered on top of traditional foundations as urban centres began to form trade networks. Postmodern perspectives emerged with the increasing internationalisation of trade (Eisenstadt 2000). However, they continue to contain traditional and modern elements. Thus, postmodern societies contain the most diverse populations in terms of their perspectives and values. They include some people who adhere to traditional values, some who adhere to modern values and some who hold postmodern values.

The progression from traditional to modern to postmodern is one that has been observed only in the history of Western societies. We do not know if other societies will necessarily follow the same progression. Inglehart and Baker (2000) present evidence to suggest that the progression is apparent in some non-Western societies as well, even though cultural distinctiveness persists. For example, the set of modern values have consistently different profiles in Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Confucian or communist societies. Likewise, the set of postmodern values each bear a different emphasis in Protestant postmodern society compared with a Catholic postmodern society. Egri (1997) reviewed the perspectives that Western, Eastern and shamanistic religious traditions adopt regarding the humankind– environment interface. Like Inglehart and Baker, she found both diversity and similarities among these traditions. However, Eisenstadt (2000) argues that there is a distinct stage of societal evolution called postmodernity that supersedes modernity. Instead, he views...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Emerging ideas, approaches and tools for practitioners and researchers
• 1 Views of sustainable development: a typology of stakeholders' conflicting perspectives
• 2 The next environmentalism: creating a new political dynamic for progress in the US
• 3 Building environmental management systems focused on sustainability: the influence of employees, company leaders and external stakeholders
• 4 The relationship between environmental sustainability, environmental violations and financial performance: an empirical study
• 5 Social system complexity: new forms of us federal agency involvement
• 6 Honda Insight: development and launch of a hybrid electric vehicle
• 7 Cultivating the sustainable corporation
• 8 Corporate sustainability: integrating human and ecological sustainability approaches
• 9 Business ecology: the future of green business?
• Biographies
• Abbreviations
• Index