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

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate around sustainability by proposing the need for an ecocentric stance to sustainability that reflexively embeds humans in-rather than detached from-nature. We argue that this requires a different way of thinking about our relationship with our world, necessitating a (re)engagement with the sociomaterial world in which we live. We develop the notion of ecocentrism by drawing on insights from sociomateriality studies, and show how radical-reflexivity enables us to appreciate our embeddedness and responsibility for sustainability by bringing attention to the interrelationship between values, actions and our social and material world. We examine the implications of an ecocentric radically reflexive approach to sustainability for management education.

Reimagining the Scales, Dimensions and Fields of Socio‐ecological Sustainability

“…This would usefully involve an extended engagement with how the logics and assumptions within these paradigms are variously applied in different sectors and contexts, or further consideration of the different forms and types of ‘growth’ in alternative paradigms. In particular, as Bansal and Knox‐Hayes () and Allen, Cunliffe and Easterby‐Smith () argue, there needs to be a much closer engagement with both physical materiality and socio‐materiality in relation to understanding the implications of sustainability for managing and organizing. Also, as Spicer () and others have argued, there is an urgent need to integrate political and social dimensions into considerations of the applicability of the concept of scale in management and organizational studies.…”

Reflexive learning and performative failure

“…Critical-reflexivity entails the questioning of social practices and organizational policies that allow and constrain certain forms of action (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015). Finally, radical-reflexivity addresses how one's social, and subsequent epistemological, position influences their reflection (Allen et al, 2019).…”

“…Consequently, it is impossible to give a full account of oneself (Butler, 2005) and retain the individual as the powerful 'agent' in the centre of the learning experience (Reynolds, 1997). It also becomes impossible to fully account for the position from which our very positionality is judged as proposed by the concept of 'radical-reflexivity' (Allen et al, 2019). As Rhodes (2009) argues, we have to be 'after' reflexivity in both senses: trying to be reflexive while also admitting its impossibility, which should actually enhance one's openness to the ethical demand of continually (re)producing new selfdescriptions for new contexts with different audiences.…”

“…In this paper, via the work of Judith Butler, we complement what could be considered more idealistic and individualistic (e.g. Allen et al, 2019;Corlett, 2013;Cunliffe 2002Cunliffe , 2003Cunliffe , 2004Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015) or more collective (e.g. Cunliffe, 2016;Gray, 2007;Keevers and Treleaven, 2011;Reynolds, 2009) understandings of reflexivity to one that highlights and examines the role of context in enabling (through performative failures) and constituting (through 'others') reflexive practice.…”

“…The paper is structured as follows. First, we start by exploring research on critical dialogical practice and the critically reflexive practitioner (Allen, 2017;Allen et al, 2019;Cunliffe, 2002Cunliffe, , 2003Cunliffe, , 2004Cunliffe, , 2016Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015). We then build on the reflexive practitioner literature by drawing on Butler's ideas on performativity and performative failure to highlight the importance of context in sites of reflexive learning.…”