Conceptualizing Cuvée Organizations: Characteristics Leading towards Sustainable Decision-Making Practices

Abstract

This paper discusses the role and responsibility of business organizations in a sustainability transition with a thought-provoking hypothetical construct, the cuvée organization. The aim of the paper is to introduce and conceptualize this normative concept on what sustainable and responsible business would look like in an ideal world—more specifically, which meta features should characterize a business organization that is designed for sustainability? It also tests the concept’s applicability to a micro-process, an everyday challenge any organization aiming for sustainability would face, namely discounting. The concept of the cuvée organization emerged from participatory backcasting, a normative scenario-building exercise conducted with a sustainability expert panel. In this co-creative process, the panel capitalized on the metaphor of cuvée wine and winemaking, which provided the cognitive means to chart the unknown. The emerged concept of the cuvée organization stands for a business archetype which is designed to serve a prosocial cause, subordinating activities and structural features accordingly. When applying this construct to discounting, our approach lies with ecological rationality in behavioral decision making as well as the practice-based approach of corporate strategy research. In this theoretically rigorous effort, we aim to show which meta-characteristics could support an organizational structure leading to better decision making, aiming to avoid various forms of temporal and spatial discounting. The originality of the research is filling the normative vision with details through the conceptualization of the cuvée organization. On the level of methodologies, our research contributes to understanding the novelty and applicability of backcasting processes and provides an astounding example for the use of metaphors in future studies.

A comprehensive review of Hungarian futures studies in light of international journal articles

“…Zajáros et al [ 153 ] accomplished a life cycle sustainability assessment project for wastewater management. Köves et al [ 85 ] discussed the role and responsibility of business organizations in a sustainability transition in a thought-provoking hypothetical construct: the cuvée organization.…”

A fenntarthatóságot szolgáló üzleti gyakorlatok fogyasztói elfogadása a COVID idején – Egy egyetemista minta tapasztalatai

“…A fenntarthatósági kihívás (Daly, 2019) a társadalom egyre nagyobb része -beleértve a vállalatokat, politikai döntéshozókat és a fogyasztókat is -számára nyilvánvaló, egyre többféle üzleti modell és kapcsolódó üzleti megoldás, gyakorlat foglalkozik ezzel a kérdéssel (Bocken et al, 2014;Zilahy, 2016). A fenntarthatósági fókuszú üzleti gyakorlatok sokfélék, némelyikük csak a főáramú társaik ráncfelvarrását jelentik (például energiahatékony termékek révén, Cornejo-Canamares et al, 2021), míg mások radikálisabb megközelítést (például a társadalmi vállalkozások megközelítése túlmutat a hagyományos profitszempontokon, Agárdi & Török, 2020;Primecz, Kiss & Toarniczky, 2019;Köves et al, 2022) követnek. Némelyikük gyorsan és széles körben elterjedt, mint például a megosztáson alapuló gazdaság (Rey-Merchan et al, 2022), míg mások inkább niche piacokat értek el, mint például a lassú divat (Grey et al, 2022).…”