Sustainable Organisations: Making it Happen!

Collective organising is essential in the transition towards sustainable organisations. This extends beyond the boundaries of organisations and pertains to a global need to make it happen.

By Dr Andy Brookes and Professor Matthijs Bal

The absurdities we are facing in our contemporary global society are only increasing: during the pandemic the number of billionaires have only increased, while the number of people living in poverty is also on the rise. The destructive effects of climate change will only exacerbate such inequalities, as it is the poorest people and countries who suffer the most from the climate breakdown. At the same time, we are also confronted with the global inability to address these problems: we have witnessed 50 years of failure since the Club of Rome report raised the need to address climate change. How can we make the transformation to a sustainable economy and to sustainable organisations happen? What is to be done?

We live in an age of hypernormalized neoliberal capitalism, which is an enormous obstacle to positive change in society. In this neoliberal capitalist era, it is not so much that we are collectively unaware of the structures of society and organisations that inhibit change, but that these structures are hypernormalized. In other words, the neoliberal model for organising society and the economy (i.e. unlimited growth and consumption, privatisation, de-regulation etc.) is perceived to be taken for granted, part of how we organise society, and a natural or normal state of things.. It is this hypernormalization which prevents effective action against the great challenges of our time, including climate change, inequality and racism.

As pointed out earlier, the imperative for change ultimately rests in our capacity to imagine alternatives: to dream and formulate societies and workplaces that protect the dignity of human beings and restore the broken planet. Change, therefore, is not a problem of finding technical solutions and creating more ‘innovation’, as they do not engage with the fundamental issue that we are faced with: our dreams of societies and workplaces that deliver upon these goals are not a matter of technical solutions, but of a political project to transform society.

Although there has been plenty of political activity aimed at addressing climate change and other global problems (e.g. UN Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Climate Agreement) these initiatives has failed to achieve meaningful progress. This failure stems from a lack of understanding, or unwillingness, to acknowledge the underlying, systemic drivers of climate change and other global problems. The continued acceptance and adherence to an economic model based on economic growth, consumption, and the burning of fossil-fuels prevents the development of genuine solutions, for example to reduce carbon emissions. The idea of carbon offsets, for example, is a market solution that in reality operates as a license for big corporations to carry on emitting carbon. A genuine commitment to sustainability will require real-zero rather than net-zero. Across the global economy, including democracies, the narrow class who control wealth, ownership and decision making have been successful in maintaining the narrow logic of the current unsustainable economic system. The status quo is perpetuated through the exercise of immense corporate wealth power enacted through a well-funded network of free-market institutions and lobbying organisations. This was clearly demonstrated by how the fossil fuel industry prevented action on climate change by deliberately deploying a ‘playbook’, previously used by the Tobacco Industry, that cast doubt on the scientific knowledge about the harms caused by their products.

For anyone in society desiring positive change to greater dignity and planetary restoration, political skills are essential. While individuals in society are currently bombarded with the need to contribute to the transformation to sustainable societies, such calls are often and exclusively focused on individual action. For instance, climate action is individualized such that we are asked to recycle our waste, insulate our houses and switch to electric cars. However, this neglects a much more important perspective, which is that of the necessity of collective action to address climate change. Recycling our waste is simply not enough and neglects the political aspects of the climate breakdown.

The current political climate is preventing meaningful collective action. The last 40 years of unbridled free-market capitalism and globalization, i.e. the neoliberal era, have failed to benefit wider society and have led to widening inequalities and dissatisfaction. In the last 10 years, following the financial crash, there has been a dramatic rise in populist forms of governance and leadership (Trump, Bolsanaro, Orban, Brexit, etc.). This ‘populist turn’ makes the collective action required to deal with sustainability more difficult to achieve. Populism promotes simple solutions to complex problems and its central beliefs are antagonistic to sustainability (i.e. protectionism and nationalism; anti-scientific approach; restrictions on civil society; targeting minorities etc.). The rise of right-wing populist governments and parties that are openly sceptical about climate science and social justice is a major problem for those committed to achieving sustainability. This emphasises the urgent need for wider engagement in political work, both in our society and our organisations.

Political work refers to ways of collective organising to address structural features of our contemporary global challenges. On the one hand, this means political engagement through greater participation in our democratic system and voting for parties that are genuinely committed to climate action. On the other hand, this means to engage in political work in organisations to transform them by means of a bottom-up process of collective organising for the transformation of these organisations. As shown by the rise in strikes across Europe in the last year(-s), there is a growing awareness of the need to collectively address problems of our society, and that collective bargaining and trade unions remain important in this process. However, such existing forms of collective organising are also most likely to stand up for immediate, short-term concerns of people, such as the need for pay raises to counter inflation and rising energy bills, and decent working conditions.

What we need, therefore, is entities such as trade unions for the transition to sustainable organisations: as employees in organisations, it is no longer only about dignified pay and working conditions, but about the contribution that organisations can make towards the transition towards a sustainable economy. In the absence of effective initiative from the employer side, which remains invested in the hypernormalization of the status-quo, it is the other stakeholders who have to put pressure on transforming organisations. Citizens can do this through their (non-)consumption patterns, but employees have an underestimated role in this process. Through collective organising, their demand should be integrative and inclusive: the sustainable organisation not only protects the dignity of employees in terms of their well-being, health and income, but should also ensure the sustainability of the environment and the planet.

As employees, the right question to be asked is what one’s duty is towards the sustainability of our society, and how organisations can be transformed. Organisations play an essential role in carbon emissions, through the global operations, supply chains, and exploitation of natural resources. Through pragmatic and strategic collective organising, employees in organisations have the power to generate real change. This necessitates a more democratic vision of how organisations function and are structured. The recent rise of strikes in various sectors (e.g., the train strikes happening across Europe) show that collective action by employees is still a powerful way of demanding change, and such strikes and collective bargaining could easily be extended to a demand for more sustainable organisations, and the ceasing of maintaining the absurdity of the exploitative organisation, which destroys the planet to benefit a small group of powerful people (managers, shareholders…), while offshoring profits to taxhavens in order to avoid contributing to the protection and development of the societal infrastructure that makes their exploitative practices possible. Nonetheless, there is a way out – and it is a path that leads through collective organising to greater sustainability of our society and workplaces.

Global problems will only be addressed through a widespread transition at all levels of society. This starts at an individual level and the decision to make a transition to a sustainable work or career, but these choices are limited by individual situation and context. Deep and meaningful transition will have to take place at organisational, sector and system level as well. The change will not happen by waiting for top-down initiatives by existing decision makers, policy makers and vested wealthy interests. There needs to be engagement at community level to make the transition to sustainable villages, towns, and cities. Citizen engagement will be required to build the solutions and consensus for the transition. It will also require ‘sustainabilisation’ policies and strategies across the major sectors of industry and society (e.g. energy, transport, food etc.) that create pathways away from the current destructive growth, consumption, fossil-fuel model. This must also be a just form of transition – where redesign and even dismantling of polluting industries is carried out in a way that minimises harm – for example, learning from the lessons of the end of coal industry in UK.

Interested in finding out more about sustainable organisations? You can read the other blogs from this series by following the links below. You might also be interested in checking-out our brand-new Sustainable MBA programme.

Resources

1. Sustainable Organisations: No more doing business as usual
2. Sustainable organisations: developing solutions and imagining alternatives
3. Hypernormalisation in Times of COVID 19 How the Absurd is Normalised
4. Bal, M., & Brookes, A. (2022). How Sustainable Is Human Resource Management Really? An Argument for Radical Sustainability. Sustainability, 14(7), 4219.
5. Podcast “How they made us doubt everything” How some of the world’s most powerful interests made us doubt the connection between smoking and cancer, and then how the same tactics were used to make us doubt climate change.
6. Fuchs, C. (2017). Critical social theory and sustainable development: The role of class, capitalism and domination in a dialectical analysis of un/sustainability. Sustainable Development, 25(5), 443-458.
7. Marschall, P., & Klingebiel, S. (2019). Populism: consequences for global sustainable development (No. 8/2019). Briefing Paper.
8. Greenpeace: Carbon offsets are a scam
9. From Words to Action: How Can EU Policy Drive Sustainability Transitions?