Discursive Closure and Discursive Openings in Sustainability

Abstract

Introduction

Sustainability is an ambiguous and open-ended concept with many different meanings. Researchers as well as practitioners often express frustration with this fact and frequently call for more consistent, measurable, and univocal definitions of sustainability to ensure agreement, mutual understanding, and collective action (Jahdi & Acikdilli, 2009; Kolk, 2003). This essay, by contrast, explores the potential of appreciating and embracing ambiguity in the sustainability arena. We argue that lack of a clear-cut sustainability definition has potential to mobilize stakeholders to challenge existing understandings and explore new ideas and practices. Accepting conceptual ambiguity, in other words, is not necessarily to evade responsibility or critique. Whereas discursive closure may bind the concept to the past and make an organization blind to new and unexpected issues of sustainability problems, an open-ended conceptualization may stimulate sensitivity, quick adaption, and innovative solutions. We refer to this practice as “license to critique.” Instead of presuming to provide final answers to sustainability issues, sustainability program can, as a license to critique, authorize and invite stakeholders to participate, challenge, and debate.

Professionalization of Sustainability as a Discursive Closure

Sustainability is increasingly the subject of codification, quantification, and measurement in and across contemporary organizations (Norton, 2005). There is, in other words, a growing industry of sustainability professionals engaged in developing techniques and methods to identify, measure, and account for corporate sustainability (Campbell, 2007). Setting and fulfilling technical standards that will benefit organizational goals as well as society becomes the target driving organizational attention and performance. Let us be clear from the onset: Standardization and quantification are important dimensions in the process of successfully integrating sustainability into business strategies and operations at all levels.

However, we also think that such instrumentally focused efforts miss an important point. The professionalization of sustainability has led organizations to conform to a functionalist perspective on sustainability. Such perspective reduces sustainability to a matter of compliance where managers and employees are expected to do sustainability according to pre-defined matrices and indices. In this perspective, sustainability is not an issue to be explored or discussed. It just has to be performed.

As a consequence of such professionalization—or naturalization—sustainability develops into what Deetz (1992) referred to as a “privileged discourse” that serves to maintain “normalized, conflict-free experience and social relations” (p. 189). A privileged discourse has its own “latent prejudice, preconception, predefined personal identity, or object production” and resembles what Jehenson (as cited in Deetz, 1992, p. 189) has labeled “moral fictions” that are used to create commitment and action and to stop debates about values. In the same way, professionalization of sustainability implies development of a privileged discourse that turns sustainability into a set of precise definitions, targets, and objects of action and measurement, determined by managers to facilitate corporate decision and action. Deetz (1992), however, invite us to step back for a moment and pay attention to the possible communicative pathology associated with such discursive privileging, which he refers to as discursive closure: “When discussion is thwarted, a particular view of reality is maintained at the expense of equally plausible ones, usually to someone’s advantage” (p. 188). In particular, he emphasizes how such distorted communication practices imply that organizations reproduce, rather than produce, themselves because they encourage reinforcement rather than challenge norms and routines, and because they translate new ideas and even critique into their own pre-defined conceptual relations, “thus precluding alternative discourses or conflicts with contrary institutional interpretive schemes” (Deetz, 1992, p. 187). Although reconfirmation and reproduction are necessary strategies in empirical reality where managers are expected to make decisions, perform, and move on, Deetz (1992) warn us that discursive closure can turn social relations into “frozen identities” as they develop internal logics and rules for participants:

Such systems, because of their closure and fixed interpretive processes, properly have no outside, no natural checks and balances, and few moments of escape to see the systems as it works. Yet they grow; they become supported by external structures and engulf others in their peculiar logics. (p. 177)

Drawing on Deetz’s (1992) insight, we argue that professionalization in the area of sustainability may lead to the reinforcement of particular experiences and viewpoints in communicative practices on sustainability, which become “preemptively preferred over equally plausible ones” (p. 174). Discursive closure is not necessarily organized as a planned strategy or “intensely governed” (Rose, 1989, p. 1), but may occur in rather quiet, repetitive micro-practices that stabilize social relations while precluding discussion and critique. It also suppresses sensibility to new and unexpected events or issues related to sustainability problems. An important implication, according to Deetz (1992), is that it may “finally strip participants of responsibility and responsiveness” (p. 177).

Sustainability as an Emergent and Open-Ended Phenomenon

We propose a different understanding of sustainability in organizations. With reference to Guthey and Morsing (2013), we call for an understanding of corporate sustainability “not as a clear or consistent agenda, but rather as a forum for sensemaking, diversity of opinion, and debate over the conflicting social norms and expectations attached to corporate activity” (p. 555). Such understanding acknowledges that sustainability is a socially constructed phenomenon that has no definite definition—no final closure. The debate on what the role of the corporation is in bringing about a sustainable society is a “contextual construct” (Matten & Moon, 2008) that develops as various stakeholders define and redefine it. Sustainability scholars have argued that one of the most salient concerns for organizations is to keep in touch with the development of the phenomenon as it is being negotiated and redefined in stakeholder interaction. For example, IKEA’s focus on sustainability, which began with stakeholder criticism about the use of child labor in its factories in India, later developed into a general concern about employee rights in emerging economies from which IKEA sources its products. Today, IKEA’s sustainability program has expanded to include a number of environmental issues that focus on forestry and transportation. Carroll (1979) has suggested that sustainability is in “constant flux” and Lockett, Moon, and Visser (2006) have suggested to acknowledge that sustainability is in a “continuing state of emergence” (p. 133).

Hence, it is an unduly simplification to expect a stable definition to ensure the identification and application of more sustainable practices. In fact, relying on simple standards in complex matters may be counterproductive (e.g., Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011). When reduction of CO₂ emissions is discussed as an issue of trade among companies, regions, or countries, it misses the crucial point that trading does not reduce emissions, but rather redistributes the allowance of further emissions—in favor of growth, production, consumption, and thus more emissions. In doing so, it creates a false relief as it takes away attention and public concern rather than engaging a public informed debate about the vast growth of CO₂ emissions at a global level, the scarcity of natural resources, and other planetary boundaries (Whiteman, Walker, & Perego, 2013). Already Aristotle (1944) argued that it is impossible to make laws that cover all cases (p. 1269a), and sustainability is a particular illustrative case for this argument. There is, in other words, no single technical standard that will eventually fix the challenges of sustainability. Therefore, it is sensible to explore the potential of an open-ended definition of the phenomenon that will enable us to capture the transformative character of sustainability in empirical reality, where issues and concerns emerge and change continuously.

Although our sustainability definition may seem discomforting to some, we think it is nevertheless central to juxtapose the many global efforts to regiment sustainability with an ongoing contestation of existing sustainability standards and programs. We will elaborate on this claim in the following section. To advance our notion of sustainability and ensure the implementation of improved practices, we cannot escape discursive closure and functionalist approaches. Yet, our argument is that such understandings cannot stand alone. It is not an either–or, but a both–and. In our endeavor to unpack our argument, we draw on Deetz’s (1992) critique of discursive closure and his observation that participation, rather than consensus is essential to keep understandings and practices open to change. In the following, we will present a mechanism that may stimulate exactly such openness. We call it license to critique.

Sustainability as Discursive Openings: “License to Critique”

Organizations and managers that adopt a license-to-critique approach to sustainability are essentially accepting the ambiguity of the concept and taking advantage of its open-ended nature. Drawing actively on the experiences, ideas, and enactments of stakeholders, a license-to-critique approach allows, indeed encourages, stakeholders to detect and report on discrepancies between organizational talk and action as well as on other organizational inconsistencies or malfunctions. The idea is not to eliminate such discrepancies and malfunctions once and for all, but to use them to challenge existing understandings and explore new ideas and practices. In this perspective, corporate values and ideals with respect to sustainability constitute “authorized speech positions”—communicative resources from which managers, employees, and citizens can draw to challenge existing corporate decisions and practices (Christensen, Morsing, & Cheney, 2008, p. 211).

Sustainability programs, thus, do not represent a “list of demands that shall be met—the sooner the better—so that the organization can finally reach perfection” (Thyssen, 2009, p. 241). Rather, a sustainability program can be viewed as a focus area, where an organization commits itself to a particular set of efforts, and in doing so remains open to discussion, critique, and change. Obviously, there is no guarantee that a sustainability program will serve to satisfy all stakeholder concerns if only managers and employees “check all the boxes” and live up to all promises. And there is no guarantee that a sustainability program will make conclusively right decisions to improve social and environmental issues. Instead of presuming to provide final answers, the sustainability program can, as a license to critique, authorize and invite stakeholders to participate, challenge, and debate.

Our perspective, thus, is a processual view where communication about sustainability—in terms of formulating definitions, challenging status quo, articulating ideals, laying down principles, contesting standards, publicizing visions, putting forward plans, and so on—has the potential to stimulate social change. Behind this idea lies a notion of language as performative (Austin, 1962; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Instead of viewing language as a neutral transmitter or conduit through which reality is described and reported, we build on theories of communication where communication is creation (e.g., Boje, Oswick, & Ford, 2004) and words have “organizing properties” (Cooren, 1999) that shape and generate organizations and their perception of reality (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Taylor & Van Every, 2000; see also Weick, 1979). By allowing managers and employees to “talk sustainability” in a license-to-critique mode, organizations enhance sensitivity to alternative thinking and solutions and, thus, their ability to change themselves. Obviously, the acceptance of such talk must come from top management, which needs to be courageous enough to experience definitions and understandings of sustainability in constant flux.

Based on an understanding of communication of creation (see also Luhmann, 1984/1995, 1995/2000; Schoeneborn, 2011; Thyssen, 2003, 2009), we have argued elsewhere that sustainability communication cannot—and should not—be a perfect reflection of existing organizational sustainability practices (Christensen, Morsing, & Thyssen, 2013). Although differences between words and actions in the sustainability arena are usually disdained, we argue that such differences have potential to move the field forward toward higher ideals and superior practices. We have referred to such difference as “aspirational talk,” and we will here argue that differences between talk and action may serve to avoid a discursive closure.

By opening up a sustainability program for critique and contestation, the organization exposes itself to tensions not only between its own talk and actions, but also to tensions created in the interaction with various stakeholders. Instead of a narrow focus that constrains experience to past definitions—where, as Deetz (1992) framed it, “the tension of difference is lost” (p. 188)—the license to critique approach invites, indeed thrives on, tensions. For example, a difference between talk and action provides a discursive opening by allowing a space for managers and employees to think for themselves rather than just obey the pre-defined rules. This is what Thackaberry (2004) discovered in her study of how members of the U.S. Forest Service were asked to critically investigate safety issues in wildland firefighting rather than simply reading and learning by heart the guidelines produced by management. The advantage—and necessity—of discursive openings has also been studied in organizations that are embedded in highly volatile contexts (e.g., Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), where a “high discretionary strategic agency” is needed (Clegg, 1989, p. 199). Here, we keep in mind that sustainability has often itself been referred to as a phenomenon of high discretionary agency (e.g., Carroll, 1979; Waddock & Googins, 2011) that calls for contextual ethical assessment (Crane & Matten, 2010) and ongoing dialogue with stakeholders (Christensen et al., 2008; Owen & O’Dwyer, 2008), because there are neither pre-existing legislations nor universal regulations to adhere to.

In fact, it may be argued that the abstract and open-ended nature of sustainability is an advantage to the sustainability area and, importantly, an advantage to corporate stakeholders as well. Central to our argumentation is that participation is more critical than sacrosanct solutions. Building on Deetz (2007), we suggest that commitment may be more important to the advancement of sustainability than consensus and agreement on sustainability standards. According to Deetz (2007), good communication is not a matter of defining common ground or securing consensus across different interests, but of allowing and cultivating a variety of perspectives to ensure that established positions are continuously challenged. Obviously, such perspective implies a tolerance for difference and variety, including acceptance of diverse interpretations of what sustainability is about. Yet, contestation is necessary to stimulate creative solutions and mutual commitment among the involved parties (Christensen et al., 2008). So, in this perspective, sustainability is not only regarded as a set of instructions from the board to be measured and accounted for by managers and employees. It does not represent a fixed set of directions that defines and describes, sometimes in minute detail, how managers and employees are supposed to think and act in specific situations. Rather, it should be understood as a set of guiding values that continuously evolves through input and challenges from managers, employees, and citizens. In contrast to rules, which are precise and past-oriented, values are open and future-oriented. Sustainability emerges as the organization embraces and responds to quests and expectations for appropriate sustainable behavior. To do so, it must be acknowledged and practiced as a license to critique.

Conclusion

Most writings on sustainability and communication focus on achieving consensus and suppressing conflict. Goals are set and must be met. In many corporations, the complexity, disagreements, and political reality of sustainability are not discussed among managers and employees. This is what is meant by discursive closure.

We propose a different perspective, more specifically to view sustainability and communication as discursive openings with a focus on the value of challenging, critiquing, and debating existing sustainability understandings and practices. Such license to critique approach encourages the generation of intensive contestation between the organization and its stakeholders as well as between different professions within and beyond the organization. We do not naïvely argue for the promotion of endless debate and destructive critique. In his influential book on Brokerage and Closure, Burt (2005) highlighted how discursive closure is excellent for promoting social cohesion and enhancing collective action. However, his main interest being the “empty spaces” or “structural holes” that separate groups, Burt argues that people who span such holes have better access to new ideas, innovation, and opportunities. In the same way, we do not argue that discursive closure is non-productive in a sustainability context. However, we do argue that managerial ambitions to encourage organizations to engage in sustainable action will be disappointed if they focus all their efforts on identifying “correct” measurements and developing more precise standards to better account for their sustainability engagement. Rigid emphasis on achieving an unambiguous definition of sustainability should call for some concern, as it may block debate and stimulate discursive closure. We also argue that the focus on instrumentality has overshadowed the productive potentiality of seeing sustainability as a constantly evolving phenomenon where organizations need to establish and maintain “empty spaces” or “structural holes” to explore and discover this evolvement. We have proposed such communicative space for sustainability as a license to critique, which is simultaneously a response to May’s (2011) call for

a set of communicative practices that are focused not so much on consensus and agreement but the dissensus and conflict that produce requisite variety and, in turn, creative solutions that sustain mutual commitment and hope to continue moving forward with innovative CSR. (p. 99)

Our message, thus, is a call for scholars to engage a debate on the mechanisms of closure that managers, certainly also scholars, import into the analysis and treatment of sustainability. It is simultaneously a call for managers to acknowledge the value of indeterminacy and to stimulate and allow for constructive critique within communicative practices. License to critique is a reminder that sustainability programs do not necessarily dictate foregone conclusions about improvement, but that such programs may serve the even more important task of mobilizing stakeholders to critically co-commit and participate in the journey.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Lars Thøger Christensen (PhD, Odense University) is a professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interests include issues of organizational identity, transparency, and talk–action relationships.

Mette Morsing (PhD, Copenhagen Business School) is a professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Her main research interests include organizational communication, identity, and governance in the context of corporate social responsibility.

Ole Thyssen (DrPhil Copenhagen University, Denmark) is a professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His main research interests include systems theory, organizational ethics, organizational aesthetics, and history of philosophy.

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