Management and the Sustainability Paradox

Reconnecting the Human Chain

David M. Wasieleski, Sandra Waddock, Paul Shrivastava, David Wasieleski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138204782
• eBook ISBN: 9781315468754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

Management and the Sustainability Paradox is about how humans became disconnected from their ecological environment throughout evolutionary history. Begining with the premise that people have competing innate, natural drives linked to survival. Survival can be thought of in the context of long-term genetic propagation of a species, but at the same time, it involves overcoming of immediate adversities. Due to a diverse set of survival challenges facing our ancestors, natural selection often favored short-term solutions, which by consequence, muted the motivations associated with longer-range sustainability values.

Managerial decisions and choices mostly adopt a moral calculus of costs versus benefits. Managers invoke economic and corporate growth to justify virtually any action. It is this moral calculus underlying corporate behavior that needs critical examination and reformation. At the heart of it lie deep moral questions that we examine in this book, with the goal of proposing ethical solutions to the paradox.

Management and the Sustainability Paradox examines the issue that there appears to be an inherent paradox between what some businesses view as "a need for progress" and " a concern for sustainability". In business, we often see a collision between ideas of progress and sustainability which shapes corporate actions, and managerial decisions. Typical corporate views of progress involve the creation of wealth, jobs, innovative products, and social philanthropic projects. On the basis of these "progressive" actions they justify their inequitable distribution of surpluses by paying low wages and exploiting ecological resources. It is not difficult to see the antagonistic interplay between technological and social innovation with our values for social and environmental well-being and a dualism that needs to be overcome.

This book is intended for a broad appeal to an academic and policy maker audience in the sustainability and management fields. The book will be of vital reading for managers seeking to reconnect our human chain with the natural environment in the cause of sustainable business.

Section I
Tensions in Values Have Created Today’s Problematic World

As the Prologue makes clear, for many people today there is a split in our consciousness that directly relates to how we humans connect with nature—or, in far too many instances, do not connect with nature. That disconnect has resulted in a dominant set of societal values that largely govern today’s world and that disconnect those of us who live in the developed West/North from the natural forces and dynamics that created our existence in the first place. That disconnect has significant consequences, as we hope to demonstrate throughout Human Chain.

The fundamental argument that we make in this book is that we humans need to once again recognize, understand, and act upon knowledge that integrates us internally and intimately with nature. We need, that is, to instill in our human social and economic systems an ecologizing set of values that complement and expand today’s dominant economizing and technologizing values, which we explore more deeply in Chapter 4. We need to connect more closely with the beautiful blue planet or what astronauts call the “blue marble”—Earth viewed from space—that is our only home and from which we draw everything we are and need. In other words, to be better in tune with nature’s capacities, resources, and limitations, humanity has to move from values of economizing, power aggrandizing, and technologizing—to use Frederick’s terms¹—to ecologizing and civilizing values that honor and understand the world around us much more completely.

In this first section of Human Chain, we will emphasize the deep connectedness of humanity to nature that arises from many cultures’ origin stories, not to mention the way the members of these cultures live their lives. Then we will look at how the set of origin stories in the Western/Northern world have been misunderstood—some might say perverted—towards a set of values in which we humans are somehow meant to dominate over nature rather than live in harmony with her. This important disconnect has resulted in numerous tensions and dualisms in values and human experiences over the “chain” of human development that further reify—or make real—this disconnect to the point where Sergio’s story in the Prologue has become the story for far too many of us.

As the discussion of the tensions will illustrate, we in the “developed” world need to reintegrate these dualisms, tensions and seeming paradoxes so that we can reorient our minds to the realities that humans and other living beings face on the planet today. Those realities include increasing recognition that human activities, along with business and other institutional models that set out to “dominate” nature are no longer feasible. Human activities—particularly economic and business activities combined with population growth, which has grown exponentially since the Industrial Era began—have now reached a point at which civilizational and ecological collapse resulting from overuse of ecological resources, climate change, and growing inequality are entirely possible. Values of dominance, materialism, and continual growth have the outcome of producing ever-greater material and financial wealth for the few, with the many being left further and further behind. The societal implications of that growing gap could mean ever-greater divisiveness and social unrest, unless something changes dramatically. And, of course, this values orientation to economizing, manifested today in neoliberal economics, has also produced a massively unsustainable set of human institutions, practices, and population pressures that put the future of our civilization at risk.

In this fraught context, we humans, at least in the “developed” world, need a relatively dramatic shift of mind—or what systems thinker Donella Meadows called mindset change.² In important ways, we need to reintegrate ourselves with nature and close the gaps in thinking and practice that some of the dualisms and gaps we will explore have created. Towards that end, we believe that an ecologizing set of values combined with civilizing values can both include and transcend the economizing, power aggrandizing, and technological values, so that they are moderated as needed in what observers now call a “full” (as opposed to empty) world and that have gotten us into this mess. The implications of the dominance of ecologizing values include what the “instrumentalization” of nature, that is, the use of nature as a solely human resource, a perspective that is not consonant with long-term flourishing for all on the planet, something we explore in Section 1.

The dominance of humans over nature arises from what we label the split minds, split worldviews in Chapter 3. There we explore the distinctions between the left and right brain and the implications of that split for today’s perspectives on the nature and purpose of the economy and the businesses that comprise it, along with the assumptions that support today’s dominant economic and societal paradigms. These ideas will set us up for a discussion in Section II on the paradoxes that the splits and differences in values have engendered.

Notes

1.Frederick, W. C. (1995). Values, nature, and culture in the American corporation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2.Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. Harland, VT: The Sustainability Institute. Retrieved from: http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/.

1 The Sustainability Paradox

There is a widening adaptive gap that can be understood in terms of sensory, cognitive, and emotional responsiveness to our environment. In order to promote and support individual and group survival, humans have created and developed elaborate structures of organization at multiple levels, from small community-based organizations to huge global transnational corporations and from local tribes and communities to societies in the context of nations to, from some perspectives, a global community. Paradoxically, individual and cultural inventions that aided in human survival actually have, in many cases, increased our distance to our ecological environs. Thus, the main tension we wish to explore in this book is between the culturally driven economic lives and our ecological context.

Over many thousands of generations any connection with nature that humans experienced and felt became muted and suppressed by these cultural and symbolic messages, leading to behaviors that had little regard for our ecosystem. We argue that short-term survival pressures through evolutionary time generated cultural responses that gradually led to the disintegration of the relationship between “man” [sic] and the natural world (forming an adaptation gap). It is our view that we need a combination of re-purposed businesses oriented towards the greater good and well-functioning governments combined with a (now largely voluntary) global governance system that sets and maintains high standards and values for various institutions. Combined with the support of powerful democratically based civil society organizations, all are needed to ensure the appropriate balance between human interests and the interests of other living entities on the planet.

Paradoxes and Business

The core identified problem that serves as the impetus for this book is that there appears to be an inherent paradox between what some businesses, which are by default today’s most powerful institutions, view as “a need for progress” and “a concern for sustainability” that manifests in much weaker civil society and ecological institutions today. As stated by Thorstein Veblen, “The accustomed ways of doing and thinking not only become an habitual matter of course, but they come likewise to be sanctioned by social convention, and so become right and proper and give rise to principles of conduct.”¹ In business, we often see a collision between ideas of progress and sustainability, which shapes corporate actions and managerial decisions. Typical corporate views of progress involve the creation of wealth, jobs, innovative products, and social philanthropic projects. On the basis of these “progressive” actions they justify their inequitable distribution of surpluses by paying low wages and exploiting ecological resources without worrying about replenishment or renewal (land, water, forests, etc.). It is not difficult to see the antagonistic interplay between technological and social innovation with our values for social and environmental well-being. It is a dualism that needs to be overcome.

Managerial decisions and choices mostly adopt a moral calculus of costs versus benefits, that is, a utilitarian values orientation. Managers invoke economic and corporate growth to justify virtually any action, in part because today’s dominant narrative of neoliberalism, as we will discuss later, justifies and celebrates continual growth and expansion with little regard for the social or ecological costs. If long-term sustainability enters into this thinking at all, it does so in a superficial morally challenged framework that emphasizes the short-term benefits over long-term risks. It is this moral calculus underlying corporate behavior that needs critical examination and reformation as we consider how businesses might be re-purposed around socio-ecological benefit and the greater good for all. At the heart of this paradox lie deep moral questions that we examine in this book, with the goal of proposing integrated solutions to co-existing paradoxes or dualities. Symbolically, we favor an evolution of sorts from Homo faber, the idea that humans control the environment through technologies,² to Homo sustinens, referring to humans who work to sustain their ecological environment. The former view of “man” favors “dominion over nature” in a Baconian sense. The latter emphasizes “reconnecting with nature” to achieve a sustainable co-existence.

Nature, Evolution, and Human Beings

The starting point for this adventure through time is with natural science and evolutionary descriptions of human behavior. We contend that there are naturally derived values, developed through natural selection over evolutionary time, that are universally “human.” In other words, there exists a set of values that are hardwired ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Section I Tensions in Values Have Created Today’s Problematic World
• Section II New Narratives, Stories, and Memes
• Section III Ecologizing Mindsets for Sustainability
• Epilogue
• Index