“Hippies on the third floor”: Climate Change, Narrative Identity and the Micro-Politics of Corporate Environmentalism

Abstract

Climate change discourse permeates political and popular consciousness, challenging the ecological sustainability of our economic system and the business models that underpin it. Not surprisingly climate change has become an increasingly divisive and partisan political issue. While a growing literature has sought to address how business organizations are responding to climate change, the subjective perceptions of managers on this issue have received less attention. In this article we contribute to an understanding of the dynamic interaction between identities and organizations, by showing how sustainability managers and consultants balance tensions and contradictions between their own sense of self and the various work and non-work contexts in which they find themselves. Based on a qualitative, social constructivist method, we examine how these individuals develop different identities in negotiating between conflicting discourses and their sense of self. We explore how these different identities arise, interact and inform responses to climate change in different settings, and then demonstrate how individuals seek to overcome conflicts between identities in constructing a coherent narrative of themselves and their careers. In doing so, the article highlights how identity work is central to the micro-political enactment of business responses to climate change, and how, for some, the climate crisis provides an impetus for personal reinvention as a moral agent of change.

Field or Fields? Building the Scaffolding for Cumulation of Research on Institutional Fields

“…Fields are by nature constellations of organizations that uphold standards together, negotiate or fight over change, or express conflicting interests. Yet their interests are typically rather narrow when compared to the "wicked" problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) facing global society, such as climate change (Wijen & Ansari, 2007;Wright, Nyberg, & Grant, 2012), the global financial crisis, poverty (Mair, Marti, & Ventresca, 2012), the Zika virus or Ebola outbreak, income inequality (Lawrence, Amis, Munir, Hirsch, & McGahan, 2014), terrorism and others. These issues, and many more mundane issues such as water governance and air pollution cannot be settled within fields; they demand the ability to analyze issues involving (and across) multiple fields-they demand interfield action.…”

Understanding Sustainability Through the Lens of Ecocentric Radical-Reflexivity: Implications for Management Education

“…Recently, studies of sustainability have explored a range of issues around the meanings of corporate sustainability in relation to scientific ideas of planetary limits ; the potential intersections between ideas of sustainability and poverty (Khavul and Bruton 2013); and how managers talk about and understand sustainability in relation to themselves and their organizational responsibilities (Cherrier et al 2012;Wright et al 2012). This work, as well as suggesting an almost boundaryless conceptualization of sustainability, implies substantial complexities in understanding its meanings for theory and action and reveals that sustainability issues are not just about the physical environment, but also about human values and identity.…”

What Motivates Green Living? A Qualitative Investigation of Sustainable Life Choices

“…This might clarify the apparent discrepancy between the attitudes towards climate change and the slack they allow themselves (Wright et al 2012). It also looks as if having some kind of balancing morality gives the participants a little sting of guilt regarding the sustainable life choices they are aware of, but still have not made.…”