Sustainability

A Key Idea for Business and Society

Suzanne Benn, Melissa Edwards, Tim Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429663918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The heightening impact of ecological and societal crises makes sustainability an increasingly urgent imperative, requiring a fundamental shift in how we understand and practice management and business.

In this book, the authors set out the key characteristics of sustainability such as its temporal and multilevel effects and highlight the complex array of sustainability risks and opportunities for business and management. Setting business within a systems perspective, the authors outline different sustainability discourses that frame how business responds to the sustainability imperative. They call for the normative and scientific approaches to sustainability to be merged so that a new transdisciplinary approach that brings together the material and relational traditions in sustainability management is developed. Sustainability work is understood as the reframing of tools, technologies, practices and business strategies to respond to the imperative. The book concludes by highlighting dynamic features of the imperative as it is shaped by the urgent need to restore and regenerate social and ecological systems. Sustainability transitions such as the Circular Economy and Net Zero are suggested as inspiration for profound business transformation.

By facing the intractable complexity associated with sustainability, this book challenges students and scholars to draw from across the sciences and social sciences to understand, reflect upon and deliver responsible business outcomes in contemporary society.

1

Introduction to Sustainability

DOI: 10.4324/9780429022173-1

Introduction

A series of catastrophic events, including the massive wildfires across several continents and the frightening COVID-19 pandemic, has occurred in the year we are writing this book. They play out in awful reality the prediction of the influential German sociologist Ulrich Beck that we are living in a ‘Global Risk Society’ (e.g. Beck, 1992, 1998). Beck’s long-held argument was that we have moved into a period of industrialisation where risk is omnipresent, whether from such globally transmitted infection, ecological issues and associated natural disasters, terrorism or technological innovations. Essentially these risks are reflexive in that they are the unintended results of modernity as it acts back on itself. The point is that the risks are interconnected, sourced as they are in a complex set of socio-economic, political and environmental conditions that are so interlinked that conventional disciplinary approaches and cognitive models cannot deal with them.

There are various factors underlying both the pandemic and the ecological crisis represented by the bushfires, such as: globalisation and massively long supply chains; rapid population growth and the phenomenon of the megacity; population density; and consumerism underpinned by the exploitation and destruction of nature such as in factory farming, trading of wildlife and landclearing. The global pandemic has served to highlight the impact on human health and the socio-economic costs of uncontrolled human development, cogently spelt out in a 2020 National Academy of Sciences publication, ‘Sustainable Development Must Account for Pandemic Risk’(di Marco et al., 2020). The events of the year 2020 are a clear indication that environmental change and societal instability have direct implications for the emergence of infectious disease and human wellbeing in general.

In this book, we examine the complex array of both risks and opportunities for change that such sustainability and sustainable development concerns pose for management and business. Throughout the book, we argue that business has the innovative capacity to transform but that this requires a dynamic shifting of the whole ecosystem in which business operates (Waddock, 2020). Individual business may indeed undergo radical change but wide scale business transformation involves cultural, political, technological and competitive change and it is such change that business must become part of.

For many, the rapid global economic growth of recent decades has delivered social benefits: rising levels of education, increased job opportunities and better access to health care, for example. But now, in dealing with the twin challenges of a rapidly spreading and deadly infectious disease and environmental degradation manifested as climate change, we as a society are faced with the extraordinary costs of exploitative systems of global capitalism. Clearly, how humans live on the planet must change and business and management are inextricably connected into seemingly intractable sustainability problems.

Sustainability is interpreted as a set of guiding principles, governance arrangements, policies, processes and actions which relate to intertwined goals of social equity, environmental restoration and economic prosperity. It is generally understood as a societal-level dilemma regarding the impact of human activity on the planet and the implications for equitable access to resources within and across the generations. The fact that a fundamental principle of sustainability is intergenerational, involving choices to be made on behalf of future generations, has proven a major challenge for both political leaders and business managers. Over the past few decades proactively engaging with this dilemma has emerged as a relevant and urgent imperative in the business and management domain.

Indeed, as this book goes to press, we are now confronted with a harsher set of choices about how we should live than the world has faced since World War II. During 2020, the direct relationship between unsustainable economic activity and ecological destruction has been made clear. For example, the lockdown of society in China over the first few months of 2020 saw carbon dioxide emissions drop by at least 25 percent and nitrogen dioxide by 37 percent (Kolinjivadi, 2020). It is no wonder, then, that as the drastic social and economic effects of the pandemic became obvious in March 2020, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, delivered a strong message to the G20 summit: A sustainable global economy must arise once the COVID-19 pandemic is reversed (UN, 2020).

As a central premise, we will argue that this sustainability imperative, derived from many disciplinary backgrounds, is a necessary, dynamic and temporal element of business and management. Yet it is problematic because it is socially constructed in both practice and theory. As such its interpretation and how actions are constructed and implemented morph and change over time and within different sub-disciplines. This proliferation of a variety of interpretations is both illustrative of the relevance of sustainability and of its problematisation, as they reflect vastly different and sometimes contradictory understandings of the imperative. Not only do the underpinning problems leading to sustainability concerns need to be understood across diverse contexts, but varying socio-political, economic and philosophical viewpoints and methodologies also occupy this multilevel terrain.

In this and the following chapters, we aim to demonstrate that management academics and practitioners must recognise this complexity and respond to the sustainability dilemma. The sustainability imperative is a call to address these pressing problems and change the behaviour of individuals, organisations and government—locally, regionally and globally. It is no longer enough to look for the one best way through government policy or managerialist top-down approaches. Nor is it enough to relegate sustainability to a narrow niche within business and management studies, as all aspects ranging from international business and governance to supply chain and human resource management are relevant contexts for sustainability. In the wider management literature, the fundamental theory and purpose of business is now also being called into question, further highlighting how more radical approaches to the sustainability imperative can provide insights regarding responsible business and management. In the next sections, we go on to further explain what we mean by the sustainability imperative and why it has proven such a challenge to organisations of all types.

The global imperative

In 2020, the year we are writing this book, ‘unprecedented’ was selected as People’s Choice Word of the Year by Dictionary.com (Eubanks, 2020). We can complain at its overuse but how better to describe a year of such social, political and environmental tumult? As we are writing this chapter, we still don’t know what will be the final tally of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of its impact on our health and economic systems. We do know that many, many vulnerable people have died and that it is bringing the global economy close to the brink, only serving to increase global inequities. The pandemic appears to have reversed the long-term fall in extreme poverty, with poorly paid workers either vulnerable to job losses in sectors such as hospitality or exposure to the infection working at the services frontline (Romei, 2020). The mortality rate from COVID-19 for Black Americans, as measured during 2020, is 2.4 times as high as the rate for Whites and 2.2 times as high as the rate for Asians and Latinos (APM Research Lab Staff, 2020). As an example of how the economy is being prioritised against human health in some countries, garment factories in Bangladesh have been accused of coercing employees back to work when work conditions cannot be made worksafe against the virus (Ellis-Petersen & Ahmed, 2020). The images we are seeing of tent hospitals set up in Central Park, of coffins bundled into trucks and of mass graves, of thousands and thousands of people in unemployment queues across the world, of streets lined with grimly shut cafes and bars, many never to open again, will live with us forever.

At the same time, several emblematic events over the last few years highlight what has gone beyond a climate crisis to a climate catastrophe. Wildfires show how our remaking of the natural world has had disastrous consequences. In their book, Fire in Paradise, Gee and Anguiano (2020) document the destruction of an entire California city in 2018 by a fire of extraordinary severity, unique in modern times. Claiming 85 lives, it is the deadliest ever wildfire in the state. More than 76,000 fires have been counted in the Brazilian Amazon, up 80 percent from 2018, linked to a spike in deforestation rates. Box 1.1 highlights the enormity of the recent Australian experience with wildfires.

Box 1.1 A changing climate in Australia

In Australia, more than 12 million hectares have been devastated by wildfires, impacting disastrously on wildlife, including in World Heritage Areas, and with tragic costs to human lives and communities. On 10 January 2020, the President of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor John Shine, stated that ‘the scale of these bushfires is unprecedented anywhere in the world’ (Australian Academy of Science, 2020). This august scientific body laid the blame for the natural disaster squarely on a changing climate. In terms of hectares burnt the Australian fires are the largest to affect any of the megadiverse countries—that is, larger than the 2019 Amazon and 2019 Californian fires.

The Academy acknowledged that Australia lost at least a billion birds, mammals and reptiles in the 2019–2020 bushfire season. This figure does not include insects, bats, fish and frogs. Thirty-four human lives were lost, including those of volunteer firefighters (Australian Academy of Science, 2020).¹

In 2019, a record-setting heat wave in Europe moved to Greenland, resulting in a massive ice melt and at least half the Greenland ice sheet turning to slush. Scientists have found that the scale of the melt was larger than ever previously experienced, and that the shelf is losing ice at a rate seven times higher than it was in the 1990s (McGrath, 2020). This is despite the groundbreaking passing of the Paris Agreement in 2016 when 196 nations signed on to attempt to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. As noted above, emissions initially dropped during the first months of the pandemic but after that temporary decline, they are now heading to pre-pandemic levels and by the end of 2020, the world was predicted to see its warmest five years on record (UNEP, 2020).

These economic and environmental issues are inextricably link...