Sustainability in organizational context: Reflections on the meanings attributed to the decision-making process and its strategic implications at Itaipu.
| Autor | Munck, Luciano |
Introduction
New ways of understanding and addressing current challenges have emerged from the debate on sustainability that point to a need for managing opportunities and threats in a way that integrates the economic, environmental and social spheres. Managers must now interpret these changes in light of the new basis for decision making, and work on transforming them into opportunities for innovation within their organizations. This shift is driven by the growing support for premises of a sustainable society among parties now critical of "old" management standards based on profit at any cost (Savitz and Weber, 2007; Munck, 2013).
Companies may now issue statements on sustainability, but few are fully focused on actually implementing these principles (Munck, 2015). If we can understand the meanings and relationships between sustainability narratives and practices, we can then build up an identity of a recognized sustainable company, hence the justification for this study. Such an understanding would enable companies to strive toward meeting the conditions identified, after which they will be able to fine tune their decision-making processes in terms of investments, resources and results.
In order to be perceived as sustainable, companies must develop their decision-making processes, both respecting and adjusting their value systems and organizational arrangements. When companies select a sustainability approach that most conforms to their objectives, purposes and strategies, and begin adapting it to their particular social circumstances, it is natural to review the dominant values of the approach (Munck, 2013; Galpin etai, 2015). However, besides the definition of new visions, the challenge is to integrate traditional concepts of eco-efficiency/environmental management with those of sustainability, and to incorporate the latter into current administrative practice (Elkington, 2001; Hoff, 2008).
To achieve a more flexible and adaptable response to the demands of the macro environment, companies must manage strategies and products so that they meet intertemporal demands: a process that must be underpinned by an in-depth understanding of the past (Bansal and DesJardine, 2014; Munck, 2015; Elkington, 2001). Indeed, whilst decisions are made in the present, they involve a series of comparisons, conflicting interests and differences in terms of past and future: this is the context within which sustainability and strategy converge. Managers, for whom time is always a key factor, understand that the results of sustainability do not always play out in the short term, but concern rather the medium and long term.
In view of the above, it is clear to see the importance of planning and implementing sustainable action within the decision-making process in such a way that there is coherence and consistency between practice and individual understanding in terms of what is considered sustainable. Therefore, our question is: within a company recognized as sustainable, do the values and meanings inherent to the strategic decision-making process also change in accordance with the premises of sustainability?
Rese et al. (2010) pointed out the potential of narratives to define organizational practice and assign meaning to contexts, as a form of reflection on the company's experience and a means of highlighting subjects' interactions and conversations. In this way, individuals play a key role in assimilating the sustainability paradigm, as they make up the relevant social networks and the relationships between these, whether on a social, corporate or organizational level (Munck and Borim-De-Souza, 2009a). By interacting with each other, members of the organization interpret their environment and construct explanations for their experience that enable them to act collectively (Maitlis, 2005); and for Daft and Weick (1984), it is the role of managers to interpret, translate and assign meaning to events.
Studies on the strategic decision-making process, organizational sustainability and its respective attributed meanings point to the possibility of identifying key factors in the process of implementing sustainability (Povoa et al, 2015). However, these factors alone are insufficient, as they rely on decision-making logic associated with sustainability, and managers do not always understand or take note of the meanings attributed to these decisions (Cavenaghi, 2016). A lack of reflection can induce people to associate sustainability and an individualistic vision, related exclusively to the organization's survival (Silva et al, 2011,2014).
As Herrick and Pratt (2013) demonstrated, the pursuit of sustainability by companies in the water sector involves a process of broad-scale organizational transformation, perceived as an emerging process that involves a number of deliberate procedures related to organizational factors, social value perspectives and projections about natural and environmental conditions. In other words, sustainable actions comprise new meanings and understandings, both on an individual and organizational level (Munck, 2015; Munck and Borim-De-Souza, 2009a, b).
Therefore, this paper aims to reflect on potential discrepancies between the meaning attributed to sustainability in the company's strategic framework, and the meaning identified in the sustainability-focused actions outlined in currently active official and narrative documents. We sought to identify and discuss disparities of meaning and their implications for the strategic decision-making process. We used narrative analysis and data obtained from publically accessible materials linked with Itaipu (the company studied) and from semi-structured interviews. We did, in fact, identify a degree of correspondence between statements made during the interviews and the sustainable practices in place. However, in light of our chosen theoretical perspective, some discrepancy was evident between the current and desired decision-making process; a potential source of internal resistance that could compromise long-term results.
Sensemaking, meaning and sustainability
The objective of this section is to introduce the concept of "sensemaking" and its main qualifying characteristics as a theoretical alternative for studying sustainability. Careless managers, or those who adhere to the meanings currently prevailing in management, "tend to interpret social and environmental issues through the simple lens of cost and benefit analysis, requiring 'only' utilitarian calculations" (Munck, 2015, p. 533). The Triple Bottom Line approach proposed by John Elkington (2001) focuses, instead, on economic, environmental and social analyses; indeed, for the author, performance must be aligned with these three dimensions in order to guide companies toward sustainability.
Assuming that changes in one dimension will have economic, ecological and social consequences for all of them, this shift represents a perceptible development of consciousness. However, the literature examined reveals no single accepted understanding of the term "sustainability," the meaning of which, therefore, is left to be constructed and created by means of an ongoing process of reinvention dependent on global demands and conceptual change (Herrick and Pratt, 2013; Starik and Kanashiro, 2013; Munck, 2015).
However, adopting a concept of sustainability is no guarantee that an organization is actually sustainable; it is necessary to acknowledge that organizations and individuals depend on the natural environment (Silva et al., 2011). Sustainable management involves more than the attempt to establish accepted meanings: it requires comprehensive approaches that reconcile different visions and respect the different time scales of the social, environmental and economic pillars of sustainable business (Munck, 2015).
This is because sustainable development seeks to achieve a steady balance between social, economic and environmental objectives, as well as to respect their interactions and different timelines; in other words, it serves to provide reference points and calls for strategic decisions in the organizational context to be aligned (Munck and Borim-De-Souza, 2009b). Further factors enabling significant advances in the execution of sustainable operations are the guidelines and values for resolving issues within the internal and external scope of the organization, i.e. different stakeholders (Herrick and Pratt, 2013).
In view of the understanding of sensemaking as an ongoing process that is subtle, swift, instrumental and social (Weick etal., 2005), the concept of building meaning fills gaps and serves as a guideline for action; this is because sensemaking provides the basis upon which meanings may be established, informing and restricting the construction of identity and its actions.
The properties of sensemaking highlighted by Weick (1995) serve as a tool for understanding collective action on an organizational level. Grounded in identity construction: it makes it possible to identify how meanings are constructed based on the past, i.e. it is retrospective; it, therefore, enables the creation of appropriate environments; consequently, sensemaking is social, because it is built around the interaction of individuals; and continuous since environments and perceptions are dynamic; therefore, it is focused on extracted cues; which then become relevant according to the context, i.e. plausibility.
Therefore, in order to deal with ambiguity, individuals seek plausible meanings that allow them to move forward, subjectively perceiving reality as endowed with an objective reality; intersubjectively legitimizing it and attributing it with meaning (Rese et al., 2010; Weick et al., 2005). In this way, organizations can be understood as systems of interpretation, within which managers are responsible for interpreting and translating formerly unnoticed events (Daft and Weick, 1984).
Consequently, sensemaking relates more to the...
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