Organizing Sustainability - Q3

Participation Prerequisites

No formal prerequisites for participation. Students should be ready for theory-driven discussion and regular reading of academic literature.

Course Content

When organizations declare sustainability as their value or goal, the path from public commitments to operational reality is fraught with complications. In this course, we’ll explore why sustainability initiatives encounter delays, detours, and dead ends. 

This course develops a theoretical toolkit rooted in organizational sociology to analyze

• how organizations publicly “walk the talk” while internally undermining sustainability policies – or vice versa, how they publicly mute sustainability efforts (decoupling);
• how the topic of sustainability travels unevenly across sub-units (loose coupling);
• how actors interpret sustainability and how discourses shape what gets attention and resources;
• and how power, conflicts, and departmental priorities shape, enable, or limit sustainability initiatives.

While this seminar focuses on the various organizational obstacles to sustainability, we will also discuss organizational innovations that may circumvent some of these problems in the final session. The seminar thus offers a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics on the path towards more sustainable organizations and gathers ideas for navigating them.

Intended Learning Outcomes and Competencies

Upon successful completion, students will be able to:

• explain and differentiate key concepts: decoupling, loose coupling, sensemaking, and micropolitics;
• analyze how organizational environments, legitimacy concerns, and sub-unit logics shape sustainability efforts;
• trace how sustainability ideas spread (or stall) within organizations and explore the reasons behind this phenomenon;
• read, summarize, and critique academic articles, articulate arguments, evidence, and limitations;
• and communicate analyses clearly in discussions.

Form of Examination

Literature

This course works best for those who enjoy reading or who would like to develop their critical thinking through reading. For each session, there will be required readings (~20-40 pages taken from academic articles or books) that you are expected to prepare for class. Therefore, have a look at the article below. Read the first couple of pages, i.e., the abstract, the introduction, and the literature review. Ask yourself whether the argument and study setup are understandable and convincing, whether you’d like to know more about the details, and whether you’d want to critically discuss the merits of the argument.

• Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015). Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability. Organization Science, 26(2), 531–549. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0960