Aideen O'Dochartaigh
University College Dublin
Aideen O'Dochartaigh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Quinn School of Business, University College Dublin, specialising in corporate sustainability and social and environmental accounting. She completed her PhD in 2014 at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and was the recipient of an IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2015.
This paper is a speculative return to the substantive matter of the different representations and understandings of sustainability within the management and accounting literatures. This is motivated, not by an explicit commitment to a single understanding but rather, by the remarkable phenomenon of such an important issue not being actively engaged and the consequences of that lack of engagement.
Within the accounting literature and within the business and management literature more generally, there are profound differences in the assumptions made by different academics in their use and understandings of sustainability, to the extent that Hoffman (2011) refers to a “schism” in that literature. These concerns have been persuasively articulated by Tregidga et al (forthcoming), whose work forms the departure point for this paper. The authors suggest that "academics who study corporate sustainability, whether consciously aware of it or not, help to both reinforce or challenge and resist business’ attempt to fix the concepts content”. They argue for academic resistance to the “hegemonic discourse of sustainable development within the corporate context”:
"Resistance, then, requires the “broadening up and opening out” (Dillard & Brown, 2015) of debate. The regeneration and rearticulation of external discourses requires these and other elements of antagonism to be reintroduced and made visible” (Tregidga et al, forthcoming:25)
In this paper we address this “broadening up and opening out”, offering a wide and nuanced array of conceptions around the empty signifier of “corporate sustainability”. The paper seeks to achieve two things. First it is concerned to try and clarify further the predispositions and implicit intellectual baggage that comes along with (for the sake of argument at this stage) assumptions of weak, semi-strong or strong sustainability. Second, and more substantively, we try to explore possible explanations for why those differences might obtain and, crucially, why debate on the differences is not apparently joined.
We revisit briefly the treatment and assumptions around sustainability, and develop a heuristic framework through which the different core beliefs and assumptions within the debate might be more clearly recognised. We then explore how we might cast these differences using lenses drawn variously from psychology, the philosophy of science, incommensurability and ideal speech as well as the sociology of worth. As with so much “debate” difference seems to essentially lie in core assumptions and the intrinsic predisposition that individuals bring to their work. Our purpose is to try to initiate some sense of where such differences ultimately ground themselves and to reach tentatively towards asking why they both continue to exist and remain un-examined.
References
Dillard, J., & Brown, J. (2015). Broadening out and opening up: an agonistic attitude toward progressive social accounting. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, 6(2), 243-266.
Hoffman, A. J. (2011). Talking past each other? Cultural framing of skeptical and convinced logics in the climate change debate. Organization & Environment, 24(1), 3-33.
Tregidga, H., Milne, M. J., & Kearins, K. (forthcoming). Ramping Up Resistance Corporate Sustainable Development and Academic Research. Business & Society, 0007650315611459.
