CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SUSTAINABILITY IN BUSINESS CONTEXTS: PARADOXES, RHETORICS AND IDENTITIES

It has been argued that business organizations can play a relevant role in addressing contemporary ecological, social and economical challenges and contributing to global sustainable development. However, many authors affirm that current attempts to implement sustainability in organizations are often biased toward business and financial goals. In the introductory part of the dissertation I thus discuss the possible tenets of a critical approach to investigate sustainability in business organizations, which consists basically in a rejection of common assumptions associated with sustainability and CSR, such as the ‘win-win’ and the ‘business case’ arguments, in favor of an exploration of the tensions arising from their implementation. I operationalized these principles in three empiric contributions that constitute the core of this dissertation. Chapter I is a multiple-case study of companies strongly committed to environmental sustainability. As a consequence, they try to orient most of their processes, levels and everyday operations towards environmental goals. The HRM system of these companies plays a major role in this regard and we found that many different green HRM practices are devoted to sustain a greater environmental sustainability in their operations. At the same time however, because of the multiple goals that characterize both corporate sustainability and HRM systems, a series of tensions emerged that affect the green HRM systems of these organizations. Following the guidance of paradox theory, these tensions have been conceptualized as eight paradoxes. The essential finding of this study is that paradoxes characterize all the companies studied and were pervasive in their green HRM systems. Besides the specific contribution to the HRM literature, this study supports the idea that sustainability is a paradoxical accomplishment in organizations, that conveys tensions and contradictions at many different levels. In their everyday work managers need thus to take into account tensions, trying to deal with them instead of uncritically downplaying conflicts in favor of a positive, win-win conception of corporate sustainability. While conducting this research project it also emerged the key role of the CSR manager as champion of sustainability in organizations. In Chapter II therefore, I investigated the emergent managerial figure of the CSR manager. I indeed conducted a study of the occupational group of CSR managers in Italy focused on how the members of this occupation conceive their role in relation to the change that sustainability is supposed to bring inside organizations. As theoretical lens I applied the concept of occupational rhetorics, which correspond to idealized images the members of an occupation use to represent their work in a favorable manner in front of themselves and their colleagues. On the basis of a multi-method research process which included in-depth interviews, observations at public events and meetings and focus group interviews, I identified five broad rhetoric repertoires (the motor of change, the business oriented, the idealist, the fatalist and the bookkeeper of CSR) that highlight the diversity and ambiguity that surround the work of these practitioners in organizations. Overall however, the large prevalence of business argumentations in their talk due to the exigency to get legitimacy for their role, lead to the conclusion that these managers are more likely to foster continuity instead of change in current business practices. Whereas Chapter II focuses at the group level and tries to account for the shared representations of the role within the occupational group of CSR managers, Chapter III further zooms-in at the individual level and investigates the identity work operated by the same managers. The topic of identity was already incorporated in the original research project, including in the interview track questions aimed at encouraging identity talk in the interviewees. Accordingly, a part of the empiric documentation of the previous study was selected and analyzed in light of the literature on identity work and paradox theory. The identity work performed by CSR managers has been conceptualized in this chapter in three tensions: the ‘goal tension’ (between a prevalent business-orientation or a values-orientation), the ‘space tension’ (between a conception of the self as an ‘organizational insider’ versus an ‘outsider’) and the time tension (between a self ‘focused on the short-term’ versus ‘on the long-term’). It was found that CSR managers react in a varied way to these tensions, in some cases embracing one pole of the tensions, in some others expressing a paradoxical identity work. In particular, the metaphors our interviewees used to talk about themselves were found to be powerful expressions of this varied identity positioning. The dissertation moves from the assumption that CSR and sustainability represent complex and contradictory accomplishments in organizations. It thus adopts theoretical frameworks that allow to track the contradictory nature of sustainability in business contexts. The first contribution of this dissertation is the conceptualization of a series of tensions and contradictions that characterize corporate sustainability at various levels. In this sense, the dissertation represents a theory building effort that moves from difficulties and conflicts experienced in concrete organizational settings, to develop theoretical insights in a relatively ‘young’ field of investigation such as corporate sustainability. The dissertation also investigates possible ways through which managerial actors react and cope with tensions. On this, the interpretative guidance provided by paradox theory in Chapter I and III results particularly useful, because it distinguishes between different types of coping strategies that are more or less suitable to deal with paradoxical tensions in organizations. In Chapter II it is instead discussed how CSR managers recur to multiple meanings to legitimize their own role, strategically leveraging the ambiguity that surrounds sustainability in business contexts. In the case of CSR managers, it was found that this ambiguity results mainly in an apology of the status quo and in a conception of CSR and sustainability consistent with a vision of ‘business as usual’. In sum, the dissertation adds to an existing body of literature that highlights the limits of current approaches to CSR and sustainability in organizations, which appear too much instrumental, rationalistic and business-oriented. It shows indeed that many tensions characterize specific aspects of sustainability in business contexts, namely green HRM policies and practices, CSR managers’ occupational rhetorics and their identity work. As a consequence, in the dissertation it is argued for the emergence of more balanced, alternative and challenging views of sustainability, which should be embraced also at the managerial level in order to be effectively implemented in organizations. In the conclusions, a reflexive account of the research path accomplished is given.