Track 16: Paradigms of Corporate Sustainability
Chaired by Tarja Ketola, Associate Professor of Sustainable Development, University of Vaasa, Finland (tarja.ketola@uwasa.fi), Cecilia Mark-Herbert, Assistant Professor, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (cecilia.mark-herbert@ekon.slu.se) and György Pataki, Senior Researcher, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary (gyorgy.pataki@uni-corvinus.hu).
Hijacking Environmentalism - Corporate Responses to Sustainable Development edited by Richard Welford was published by Earthscan in 1997. Now, a decade later, it is time to evaluate the changes that have taken place in the paradigms of corporate sustainability.
Welford's book examined the way in which industry had until then attempted to deal with sustainable development. The argument of the book was that progress had been poor because of the lack of real commitment to all aspects of the sustainable development concept. The authors challenged "business to change, to recognize its potential for leadership and to go beyond mere lip-service to the environmental and social crises which are mounting".
Hijacking Environmentalism demonstrated that "whilst modernist versions of environmental management have received some attention, the wider ecological, ethical and social aspects of sustainable development have been ignored and usurped. ... industry has hijacked the more radical environmental debate taking it out of its traditional discourses and placing it in a liberal-productivist frame of reference." (Welford 1997: x)
Welford's book showed how businesses continued to operate outside the ecological carrying capacity of the environment. It also claimed that there remained strong underlying conflicts between sustainable development and free trade. Furthermore, the book argued that companies put too much emphasis on hierarchical organization forms, which stifled participation. Welford called for an ecological and spiritual awakening amongst business leaders. He also encouraged more critical research on business activities - the kind that would abandon both restrictive positivist and traditional interpretative paradigms of analysis.
What has changed since Hijacking Environmentalism - if anything - and why? What should change and how? Relevant topics to this track include:
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Critical perspectives on the past/present paradigms of corporate sustainability
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Ecomodernist paradigms in retrospect and their potential in the future
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The role of postmodernism in corporate sustainability
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Organizational, managerial and psychological evaluations of the relationship between corporate values, discourses and actions
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Development of future paradigms of corporate sustainability
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Mälardalens University is the first University in the world
to become enviromentally certified according to the
international standard ISO 14001.
