Complex and urgent challenges including climate change and the significant decline in biodiversity provide a broad agenda for interdisciplinary scholars interested in the implications facing businesses, humanity, and other species. Within this context of sustainability, persistent conflicts between key paradigms create substantial barriers against—but also opportunities for—developing new conceptual approaches and theoretical models to understand and respond to these critical issues. Here, I revisit paradigmatic tensions to assess their impact on research and debate on sustainability, ethics, and business. Drawing on (...) relational ontology and values of nature that recognise humanity’s tight embeddedness within the planetary ecosystem, I examine how conceptualising sustainability as the pursuit of life might generate new insights for research and practice into the wider transformation needed to sustain and restore socioecological systems. The aim here, however, is not to reconcile these paradigmatic tensions but instead use them as a fruitful lens for examining the implications for sustainability, while acknowledging the inherent ethical dilemmas for individuals, organisations, and society. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer some conceptual building blocks, or rather conceptual flows, towards a radical processual rethinking of the type of agency that allows for the sustainable production and consumption of fashion. Appeals to principled decision making or calculating costs and benefits instrumentally fail to engender the necessary behavioural changes, and more importantly, our current conceptual apparatus cannot account for the relationality that fosters sustainable lifestyles. An empirical study of upcycling practices allows us to interrogate the agency involved in (...) sustainable organising and acknowledge the complex forms of valuation that take place in and through the making process. Our data were analysed through the lens of John Dewey’s pragmatist perspectives on valuation and were brought into conversation with literature on ‘making’, more specifically through the anthropological work of Tim Ingold. We contend that current conceptualisations of sustainable organising are inadequate because they undermine the relational orientation that sustainable organising entails. We argue for a processual, relational approach to valuation, which allows for the accommodation of a plurality of ways of thinking about what sustainable organising may mean. To live sustainably, one has to stay close to materials, engage relationally with one’s histories and contexts, and allow valuation to present itself as part of everyday practice. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often criticized for being undertheorized, contested, and largely redundant in the field of business and society. Yet limited attention has been paid to diverse ways of theorizing CSR. Driven by the identified weaknesses in the theoretical development of CSR, this research aims to explore the potential of theory elaboration implemented via grounded theory (GT) in strengthening CSR theorization. In doing so, the study offers a unique contribution by being the first study to offer actionable steps (...) and guidelines for implementing theory elaboration via GT in CSR research. The study also offers a typology that can serve as a decision-making tool for researchers seeking to implement theory elaboration through GT in their CSR studies. Lastly, as a result of conducting two sets of literature reviews, the study outlines a number of CSR topics that can benefit from the proposed research pathway, and the particular theoretical CSR benefits theory elaboration via GT can offer. Hence, the study aspires to serve as a “stepping stone” for offering enhanced CSR theory. (shrink)