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Sustainability Beyond Instrumentality: Towards an Immanent Ethics of Organizational Environmentalism

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Abstract

In research on organizational environmentalism, there has been a repeated call for ways to go beyond the business case for sustainability frame. While the business case frame assumes that developing eco-friendly solutions can benefit firms financially, this article highlights the importance of challenging established understandings of sustainability. To this end, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between morality and ethics. Morality involves passing judgements on the basis of values. Ethics provides an immanent evaluation of the principles by which specific solutions are considered sustainable. Analysing interviews with architects, building engineers and business developers, the article shows how these actors reflect on the values that form the basis of their practice, but also try to imagine new ways of working with sustainability. In conclusion, the article suggests that an immanent ethics of organizational environmentalism can allow for the values that inform environmental efforts in organizations to be evaluated as well as alternative visions of sustainability to be created.

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Notes

  1. Source: https://www.unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/our-work/environment.

  2. Source: Energistyrelsen (2015): Bæredygtigt byggeri, first edition, 978-87-93071-94-0.

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Funding

This study was funded by the Velux Foundation in Denmark.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 18B, 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Christian Garmann Johnsen

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  1. Christian Garmann Johnsen
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Correspondence to Christian Garmann Johnsen.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Johnsen, C.G. Sustainability Beyond Instrumentality: Towards an Immanent Ethics of Organizational Environmentalism. J Bus Ethics 172, 1–14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04411-5

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