SEARCHING FOR SHARED MEANING: DEFINING AND MEASURING SUSTAINABILITY AS INSTITUTIONAL WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
Date
2022-08-29
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0002-1553-4326
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
About me
In my schooling, worklife, and even childhood interests, the natural sciences played a big role. Although I certainly derived inherent satisfaction from many aspects of natural science, I was primarily motivated by an interest in engaging with environmental challenges, and believed that environmental sciences were essential to doing so. I believe in the value of environmental science to understand the natural environment, but I have seen very limited evidence of its value in changing organizational behaviour. My interest in sustainability reporting arose because it fit with my rationalistic understanding of integrating environmental information into organizational decision making and translating it to action. I became interested in the organizational literature because I wanted to better understand my own frustrating experiences of largely unsuccessful efforts to promote organizational engagement with sustainability.
Purposes
The main purposes of this dissertation roughly correspond to its central chapters. The purposes of Chapter 2 were to understand the term sustainability, and secondly, to present an alternative to ‘defining a term’ through denotation by documenting senses in use and their contexts. The purposes of Chapter 3 were to characterize the academic literature on sustainability reporting in higher education and the methods used to approach the problem. The purposes of Chapter 4 were simply to introduce the reader to an institutional perspective and help them through Chapter 5. The purposes of Chapter 5 were to understand the experiences of sustainability entrepreneurs with sustainability reporting at higher education institutions and to integrate organizational change literature (by sustainability entrepreneur, I mean someone who champions sustainability in an organizational context and in doing so, tries to engage with its institutions). Throughout the dissertation, I explore the value of collaborative approaches to resolving the uncertainty associated with complex problems.
Approach
I used multiple approaches. Throughout the dissertation, I used personal reflection, reading, and writing. To understand the meaning of sustainability, I drew on a semasiological approach to document and synthesize the many senses of the term. To understand the experiences of sustainability entrepreneurs with sustainability reporting in higher education institutions, I held semi-structured conversations with them and contextualized their experiences through institutional perspectives.
I cited various literatures in this dissertation. To contextualize my exploration of the meaning of sustainability, I relied on the semantics and sustainability literatures. To explore the sustainability reporting in higher education literature, I read a set of articles that met search criteria, rather than a cohesive, distinct literature. To contextualize the experiences of sustainability entrepreneurs with sustainability reporting, I used the institutional literature.
Findings
Sustainability entrepreneurs tend to have reflected deeply on the meaning of sustainability, and used it in many senses, some of which reflected their efforts to communicate effectively in their organizational and social contexts. A linguistics approach helped to illustrate how senses evolved over time and in interactions with others to develop shared meaning.
The emerging industry standard for sustainability reporting in higher education is the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS). Scholarship had not contributed to its evolution or its evaluation. The broadest questions about sustainability reporting are over its effectiveness, which can only be addressed with a framework external to the sustainability report, ideally through rigorous scholarship. The scholarly literature had very little to contribute to these questions.
For most sustainability entrepreneurs, although the outcome of reporting could enable formal organizational change initiatives, the greatest value tended to derive from the process of reporting. Sustainability reporting both enabled sustainability entrepreneurs to communicate using the rationalistic language of control and conferred legitimacy to sustainability initiatives. With that legitimacy, sustainability entrepreneurs could perform institutional work, using their creativity and empathic abilities to find shared meaning with their conversational partners, enabling individual and collective agency.
Implications
The sustainability challenge is a complex, intersubjective phenomena. We have traditionally engaged with the challenge through rationalistic approaches with—as yet—limited effectiveness. Collaborative approaches do not preclude or devalue rationalistic approaches; they recognize the reality that much of human and organizational behaviour is extrarational. Unsustainable practices have become institutionalized; challenging an institution requires developing agency. This exploration of the experiences of sustainability entrepreneurs suggests that collaboratively grounding reporting in the experiences of staff can enable more effective reporting, better practices, and more professionally fulfilled staff. Collaboration allows the integration of experiences, which can enable change in complex systems.
Description
Keywords
sustainability, institutional entrepreneurs, semantics, polysemy, organizational change, Canadian Prairies, sustainability reporting, higher education institutions, STARS, institutional work
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
School of Environment and Sustainability
Program
Environment and Sustainability