Urgent need for change
End poverty in all its forms everywhere. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation. Reduce inequality within and among countries. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
These are just some of the goals that the world needs to achieve by the year 2030, as set forth by the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Agenda 2030 is a roadmap for sustainable development, signed by all UN member states. Its central element is the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs), which identify different areas of sustainable development that require our immediate attention (see Box 1.1). The SDGs define sustainable outcomes for both social and environmental sustainability challenges.
Box 1.1 The 17 Sustainable Development Goals
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 (https://sdgs.un.org/goals):
- SDG 1: No poverty
- SDG 2: Zero hunger
- SDG 3: Good health and well-being
- SDG 4: Quality education
- SDG 5: Gender equality
- SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation
- SDG 7: Affordable and clean energy
- SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth
- SDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure
- SDG 10: Reduced inequalities
- SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities
- SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production
- SDG 13: Climate action
- SDG 14: Life below water
- SDG 15: Life on land
- SDG 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions
- SDG 17: Partnerships for the goals
The SDGs present formidable challenges for humankind and urgent action is needed in and across societies to reach the goals. This book provides insights into how different actors can organise for transformative action towards sustainable outcomes, as expressed in the SDGs. We propose the concept of “responsible organising” for state-of-the-art thinking on how to tackle sustainability challenges.
Responsible organising
This book critically explores and examines conventional approaches to sustainability and suggests new ways of thinking and organising for sustainable outcomes. The book offers new paths forward that recognise the complexities and connections inherent to sustainability challenges today and in the future.
We propose responsible organising as an umbrella concept for the organisational, socio-ecological, and transnational processes required to tackle sustainability challenges and achieve sustainable outcomes. “Organising” refers to how different actors take action to change and transform organisations, societies, and transnational institutions. It draws attention to activities and practices. “Responsible” refers to a reflexive understanding of how to organise for sustainable outcomes. We believe that it is how sustainability is understood and acted upon that lies at the core of finding solutions to the challenges we are facing.
Responsible organising helps to address a variety of fundamentally important challenges and solutions in organisations, societies, and transnational connections. The book zooms in on practices through which people can tackle and fight sustainability challenges by doing things in new ways, organising for transformative action, and infusing organising with responsibility. Our examples range from individuals, families, and groups to companies and other organisations, networks, ecosystems, supply chains, and markets across the world.
The book offers topical examples of responsible organising for transformative action towards the SDGs from different fields and geographical settings in both the Global South and North to illustrate its key points. The book covers all 17 SDGs. The authors represent 13 nationalities and the geographical scope in their work used as examples is vast, including Australia, Chile, China, Ethiopia, the EU, Finland, Haiti, India, Kenya, Tanzania, and USA.
This edited collection of short, clear, concise, and compelling chapters brings together scholars in a range of disciplines all with a keen interest in studying responsibility, equality, and sustainability. The book is authored by experts in different fields based at, or affiliated with, Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. We are not only an international, but a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary academic community that has established a space for researching, discussing, and fostering action on responsibility, equality, and sustainability. The book draws from research in fields such as corporate responsibility, sustainability science, macromarketing, social marketing, supply chain management, organisation and management theory, decolonial studies, and gender, diversity, inclusion, and intersectionality studies. It blends theoretical perspectives to study humans and social interactions, organisations, as well as nonhumans and living environments. We argue that a boundary-crossing approach is needed to make explicit and tackle questions of responsibility, equality, and sustainability that are complex, interconnected, and often ambiguous and contested.
The book is divided into five parts. The first part (Chapters 1–4) discusses the need for new ways of understanding sustainability challenges. It suggests the need to rethink how we address responsibility, (in)equality, and sustainability in three central ways: rethinking corporate social responsibility (CSR), refocusing the idea of diversity to tackle inequalities, and engaging with the nonhuman world in new ways. The next three parts provide discussions and examples of novel ways to organise in these areas. Table 1.1 gives an overview of the geographical settings and SDGs covered in the chapters in Parts II–IV. The fifth and final part summarises the book’s key messages in a single chapter.
Table 1.1 Overview of the geographical settings and SDGs covered in the book | Chapter | Geographical setting | SDGs |
| 5 | Global | 3, 9, 10, 13, 16 |
| 6 | China, USA | 17 |
| 7 | Finland | 16, 17 |
| 8 | Finland | 7, 12, 13, 17 |
| 9 | Europe | 3, 8, 9 |
| 10 | EU | 1, 2, 10, 12, 13 |
| 11 | Finland, India, Kenya | 1, 3, 8, 12, 15, 17 |
| 12 | Haiti | 10, 11 |
| 13 | Ethiopia, Tanzania | 1, 10, 17 |
| 14 | Global | 4, 5, 10 |
| 15 | Tanzania | 4, 5, 8, 10, 12 |
| 16 | Global North | 3, 5, 8, 10 |
| 17 | Finland | 13, 15 |
| 18 | Ethiopia, India | 6, 9, 10 |
| 19 | Australia, Global | 12, 14, 15 |
| 20 | Chile, Finland | 10, 11, 13, 15 |
Responsibility in a changing world
In Part II, we discuss how (corporate) responsibility can be made useful in organising for transformative action for sustainable outcomes. Conventional approaches to CSR have been argued to lack the ability for transformative action, as argued in Chapter 2. The chapters in Part II suggest a variety of ways to rethink responsibility and provide examples of how companies and other organisations can approach responsible organising in new ways to contribute to sustainable outcomes. The chapters discuss the need to recognise changes in the global environment, how to strengthen CSR activities through collaboration with stakeholders, and responsible organising of different parts of the operations of companies and other organisations.
Chapters 5 and 6 provide analyses of the global environment, which lay the foundation for responsible organising. Chapter 5 analyses global risks that need to be recognised when organising for sustainable outcomes. The authors identify interconnected risks that are critical for the sustainability of societies. One such risk is changes in the political landscape. Chapter 6 picks up on this key issue and analyses how the re-emergence of geopolitics is changing the global environment. The authors suggest that the SDGs have potential to be useful for easing geopolitical tensions and opening up dialogue across the world on how to organise for sustainable outcomes globally (SDG 17).
Chapters 7 and 8 provide examples of how companies and other stakeholders can organise in multi-stakeholder initiatives to achieve sustainable outcomes. Chapter 7 gives an example of a cross-sector collaboration that used political action to call for regulation of corporate conduct. The authors argue that organising for political action in such a way can strengthen corporate responsibility by making certain practices mandatory for companies. Chapter 8 shows how energy production (SDG 7) can be made more sustainable when companies and other actors align their activities to create value for society. The authors argue that such an ecosystem approach to responsibility is necessary for transforming systems of production and consumption (SDG 12).
The final chapters in Part II discuss how to organise the operations of companies and other organisations more responsibly. Chapters 9–11 provide analyses of the responsibility of different parts of organisational operations: organisational innovation, supply chains, and marketing. Chapter 9 shows how fostering innovation (SDG 9) in organisations can have negative cons...
