Becoming green,becoming leaders: Identity narratives in sustainability leadership development

Abstract

Sustainability leadership, exercised towards ecologically sustainable practices in business and society, has emerged as an important aim of leadership development programmes. Through the multimodal discursive analysis of a sustainability leadership centre in Australia, we demonstrate how its identity narratives reproduce individualist ideals of leadership and take for granted the hyperagency of heroic individuals to single-handedly solve environmental crises. Specifically, we illustrate how the development of sustainability leaders is co-constructed through the Buddhist narrative of Prince Siddhartha via three stages: leaders first find their calling that activates their inherent capability to effect change, reach awakening through self-discovery and self-empowerment with the help of the development programme, and finally transform the world through building both successful and meaningful careers. In the light of these findings, we question whether sustainability leadership discourses glorify the self and ironically sustain our disconnection from nature in the pursuit of business success.

Keywords

Discourse identity leadership leadership development narrative sustainability

Introduction

In our current social climate of heightened sensitivity to ecological concerns, ‘sustainability leadership’ has emerged as an important organisational ideal for learning (Ferdig, 2007; Galpin and Whittington, 2012; Metcalf and Benn, 2013; Pearce et al., 2013; Riseley, 2016). Sustainability leadership – also promoted under related labels such as environmental, ecocentric and green leadership – broadly refers to the attributes and behaviours required to promote change towards environmentally sustainable practices in their organisations and communities (Metcalf and Benn, 2013). Leadership developers drawing on (and regulated by) this discourse frequently position themselves as promoting the development of new (and implicitly ‘better’) managerial selves that are equipped to tackle ‘wicked’ (Gallagher, 2016; Gosselin et al., 2016) environmental problems. However, critiques of corporate environmentalism (e.g. Banerjee, 1998, 2001, 2008; Springett, 2003, 2005) call into question such an overreliance on the self, highlighting the broader systemic and structural limits in which corporate agents operate. As Banerjee (2008) argues, managers are constituted by a ‘complex system of institutions, regulations, texts, policies and practices’ (p. 67), which limits and constrains their ‘freedom to make socially responsible decisions’ (p. 58). At the same time, an emerging body of critical leadership studies is highlighting the need to conceive of leadership in more relational, practice-based and dialogic terms (Carroll et al., 2008; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012; Raelin, 2011, 2016), thus challenging traditional ‘heroic’ views of leadership and promoting a concept of ‘collaborative agency’ (Raelin, 2016) that is embedded in wider structural and contextual changes.

In this article, we seek to problematise the influential construct of sustainability leadership and the growing industry of sustainability leadership development. Following from the critical, social constructionist literature on sustainability (Allen et al., 2017; Kurusz et al., 2014; Phillips, 2014; Wright et al., 2012) and leadership development (Carroll and Levy, 2010; Edwards et al., 2013), we analyse the multimodal discourses of a prominent sustainability leadership development organisation based in Australia, the Centre for Sustainability Leadership (CSL), to examine how ‘sustainability leadership’ is discursively constructed. In particular, we show how sustainability leadership development can promote certain idealised narrative identities that reproduce an enduring pre-occupation with the self (Knights and O’Leary, 2006). In doing so, we contribute to critical studies of leadership and management (Carroll and Levy, 2010; Nicholson and Carroll, 2013; Sveningsson and Larsson, 2006; Warhurst, 2012) by showing how sustainability leadership has become popularly understood in instrumental terms of individual agency and unilateral change and control. We do so by demonstrating the multimodal dynamics in the discursive construction of leadership identities.

The article begins with a review of the leadership development literature, canvassing how emerging critical scholarship has called into question the essentialist and functionalist approaches that have traditionally dominated the literature. Our review then explores the nascent but influential construct of ‘sustainability leadership’ and shows how it reflects the individualist focus of mainstream leadership theorising. Following this, our research methodology and the site of our discursive analysis, the Centre for Sustainability Leadership (CSL), will be introduced, before the findings of our study are detailed. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our analysis for the conceptualisation and development of sustainability leadership and consider directions for future research.

Sustainability leadership development

In the context of growing media reporting of anthropogenic climate change, leadership development programmes have turned their attention to the need for managers to hone their ethical and environmental awareness (Cooper et al., 2005; Edwards et al., 2013; Metcalf and Benn, 2013). Specifically, there has been rising interest in forms of ‘sustainability leadership’, which seek to harness leadership towards ecologically sustainable practices in business and society (Cosby, 2014; Ferdig, 2007; Hind et al., 2009; Metcalf and Benn, 2013).

Thus far, a pre-occupation of this emerging literature has been the search for a better understanding of the individual competencies and skills that constitute effective sustainability leadership (e.g. Cosby, 2014; Hind et al., 2009; Kakabadse et al., 2009). For instance, drawing on mixed-methods research, Hind et al. (2009) develop a list of 20 key competencies of sustainable leaders and link these to a set of cognitive abilities (e.g. systemic thinking, balancing global and local perspectives) that are seen to act as mediators of leader behaviours. Hind et al. (2009) conclude that the complex environmental challenges which leaders face today require new forms of (responsible and ethical) leadership, which are best supported through ‘changes to the competency frameworks operational within organisations’ (p. 19). In a similar vein, Metcalf and Benn (2013) argue that leadership exercised towards the goals of environmental sustainability ‘requires leaders of extraordinary abilities’ (p. 370). To navigate successfully through complex, ‘wicked’ problems, this new breed of leaders must demonstrate high emotional intelligence to successfully deal with uncertainty and guide others through it while ensuring a successful link between organisational and environmental dimensions (Metcalf and Benn, 2013). Kakabadse et al. (2009) empirically extend this theme of the self by identifying a set of 10 leadership capabilities and linking these to particular stages in the process of corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementations.

Much of this strand of the sustainability leadership literature resonates with competency-based approaches to leadership development and is focused on distilling surface-level and generalised behavioural patterns that effective sustainability leaders ought to develop. In doing so, sustainability leadership is not only divorced from the context of the diverse meaning-making frameworks in which it is embedded (Marrewijk, 2003), but it is also too often constructed through the logic of an anthropocentric worldview (Purser et al., 1995). Indeed, this form of theorisation and development may be seen to overemphasise the status and influence of individual leaders while downplaying and/or sidelining the structures, collective agencies and contexts in which individuals participate (Banerjee, 2008; Raelin, 2013; Springett, 2005).

This overemphasis on individual agency has been a central concern of the critical literature on environmental greenwashing (Banerjee, 2001; Jones, 2012; Laufer, 2003; Springett, 2003), which calls into question the rhetoric of heroism and success that frequently accompanies corporate greening research and practice. As Boiral et al. (2014) argue, ‘research on environmental leadership tends to project an idealised image of green leaders who are often made out to be the new heroes of sustainability’ (p. 365). This image tends to obscure the ways in which individuals are constituted as subjects through organisational and institutional discourses, which legitimise certain truth claims and organisational practices of sustainability leadership (Phillips, 2012; Phillips and Rumens, 2015, 2014; Wright and Nyberg, 2012, 2014, 2015; Wright et al., 2012). While such a Foucauldian view does not preclude the possibility for agency and ‘conscientisation’ (Kurusz et al., 2014), it does shed light on the ways in which agency is inextricably tied to broader discourses of sustainability which – as Banerjee and others (Banerjee, 1998, 2001, 2008; Springett, 2003) have argued convincingly – are often ‘defined by narrow business interests and serve to curtail the interests of external stakeholders’ (Banerjee, 2008: 51).

Collectively, these critical voices in the sustainability literature point – implicitly or explicitly – towards the importance of considering how leadership identities are conceived conceptually. Competency-based approaches primarily follow from individualist and essentialist views of identity, which too easily lead to the reduction of leadership to individual traits and behaviours (Bolden and Gosling, 2007; Buckingham, 2001; Carroll et al., 2008). The latter are seen to allow leaders to exercise ‘control’ or ‘influence’ over the environment, which thereby becomes an object of the management agenda (Allen et al., 2017).

This Cartesian worldview, which affords supremacy to humans as knowing subjects who stand outside or above the environment, has been variously called into question by constructive-developmental (Boiral et al., 2014; Brown, 2012), systems theoretical (Martin, 2005; Porter and Córdoba, 2009) and ecocentric perspectives (Allen et al., 2017; Borland et al., 2016; Purser et al., 1995). At their core, such perspectives lend themselves to a reconsideration of the need to recover a sense of interdependence and interconnectedness with the environment. From this point of view, a pre-occupation with the self as a separate and superior agent – embedded in and constituted through leadership discourses – is arguably what lies behind our disconnection from the environment in our pursuit for business growth. When individual leadership and its heroic capabilities are assumed as normative ideals as such, the ways in which social meanings of ‘leadership’ are brought into being through prevailing discourses and institutionalised practices, including those of leadership development providers, may be overlooked (i.e. absence of a ‘language of critique’) (Kurusz et al., 2014). As a result, dominant discourses and practices may overshadow alternative forms of conceiving of sustainability leadership (i.e. absence of a ‘language of possibility’) (Kurusz et al., 2014).

Amidst the proliferating individualist conceptualisations of sustainability leadership, these issues have been taken up in particular by critical and social constructionist voices which have started to make significant inroads into the field (Allen et al., 2017; Kurusz et al., 2014; Phillips, 2012; Raelin, 2011; Wright et al., 2012) Specifically, in line with the critical leadership development literature, emerging examinations of corporate environmentalism have revealed important insights into how green identities are discursively constructed (Allen et al., 2017; Cherrier et al., 2012; Phillips, 2012; Wright et al., 2012).

For example, Wright et al. (2012) explored the narrative identities of sustainability managers and consultants to detail how they constructed a coherent self across varied contexts including traditional organisations, environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local communities. They identified three identity types: the green change agent, rational manager and committed activist, but rather than being fixed, the sustainability professionals they interviewed fluidly adopted different types depending on their context (Wright et al., 2012).

Phillips (2012) examined sustainability identities among entrepreneurs, whom she referred to as ‘ecopreneurs’. Through a case study of a sustainable start-up, Phillips (2012) looked at the narrative identity construction of the two founders and shows how they presented the masterplot of a quest involving three stages: the possibility (awareness of environmental issues and entrepreneurial opportunities), realisation (the establishment of their company) and conclusion (recognition of the importance of a holistic life).

These studies show that sustainability issues are intrinsically tied to issues of identity (Allen et al., 2017), however, not in an essentialist or fixed sense, but in ways that reveal the socially constructed and fluid nature of identities and, simultaneously, the relational and contextual dimensions of sustainability. Although this body of work has collectively made critical advancements into the study of sustainability leadership, there is potential to extend research of sustainability discourses in the context of leadership development and problematise dominant constructions of sustainability leadership. By exploring a leadership development centre, we seek to further extend the critical sustainability literature and show how other social actors – in this case, leadership developers – can play a role in co-constructing idealised sustainability identities. Drawing on both the languages of ‘critique’ and ‘possibility’ (Kurusz et al., 2014), this involves providing a more fine-grained understanding of the ways in which sustainability leadership identities are discursive constructs that privilege certain meanings (and interests) over others while simultaneously (through the mechanisms of intertextual and narrative fluidity) holding spaces for alternative meaning-making.

Research methodology and context

Within the discipline of organisation studies, ‘discourse’ is most commonly defined as a form of social practice that informs how we see the world (Fairhurst, 2007; Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012; Grant et al., 2011). As such, discourse refers to both language in use within communicative interactions and wider systems of thought that dominate our views of social reality within its specific context (Fairhurst, 2009). Discursive studies of leadership enable an analysis of the ongoing, relational and intersubjective acts between people, which offer a constructionist counterpoint to prevailing realist perspectives in mainstream leadership literature (Ford and Harding, 2007).

Our study focuses on the discursive practices of CSL, an Australian provider of leadership development programmes. We analysed CSL’s publicly available web content to explore, in particular, the role of narrative in the construction of sustainability leadership identities. Our approach was informed by what may be characterised as a multimodal, critical discursive lens (Grant and Iedema, 2005). Multimodality recognises the growing role of other semiotic activities beyond language in discourse analysis, including the prevalence of visual and audio modes in new media (Iedema, 2007). Our approach is grounded in the tradition of social semiotics that recognises the interlinked and intertextual nature of the visual and verbal (Meyer et al., 2013). Neither verbal, visual nor audio texts can be fully understood in isolation, but rather, meaning is made through their interaction (Meyer et al., 2013; Van Leeuwen, 2005).

From a critical discursive perspective, social actors such as CSL generate narratives that contain truth claims around what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘effective’ sustainability leadership. The narratives produced by CSL entrench assumptions of how to be a sustainability leader that eventually become taken for granted in our culture (Watson, 2009). Such narratives are important to the study of identities because they act as discursive resources that individuals use to make sense of (and enact) their experiences and relationships with others (Boje, 1995; Czarniawska-Joerges, 1997; Gabriel, 2004). Indeed, individuals construct their self-identities (their notion of who and what they are) by maintaining a coherent personal narrative that draws on the repertoire of stories that exist around us in our socially constructed realities (Watson, 2009). In the context of leadership development, they can be understood as ‘management tools to involve people in … [a] change process’ by promoting certain values and acting as a means for ‘helping people envision potential future realities’ (Rhodes and Brown, 2005: 173).

Importantly, narratives are also inherently political (Mumby, 2004) as they are fashioned to encourage particular versions of the self and bear ‘the imprint of dominant cultural meanings and relations of power’ (Ewick and Silbey, 1995: 211). Thus, by creating and disseminating texts that engage with broader discursive regimes (e.g. environmentalism, neoliberalism, climate change), leadership development institutions play a role in (re-)producing power relations and ‘subject positions from which only certain identities can speak’ (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2004: 166).

Research context

CSL is a development organisation based across Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. The Centre was founded in 2005 and its development programmes range from a 7-month long series of weekly workshops and weekend retreats to an online-based training module, Leadership Rewired. Our focus on the Centre was motivated primarily by its influential role in shaping the meanings of sustainability leadership in Australia. At present, CSL is the sole Australian provider of leadership development programmes where sustainability is framed as the core focus rather than a tangential issue. The Centre has a network of ~500 alumni, maintains relationships with major corporate partners (including Boeing, Fujitsu and ANZ Trustees) and receives state government funding for its ‘Leaders for Sustainability’ programme. CSL also maintains ties with the local government, particularly representatives of the Australian Greens, who often feature as guest speakers at their yearly public information sessions and graduation ceremonies.

Our study focuses on the publicly available discursive resources of CSL as we are interested primarily in the Centre’s construction of narrative identities. This approach aligns with the discourse analytic tradition in media analysis, which is concerned with how traditional and new media act as sites on which ‘shared meanings’ of our culture are circulated (Talbot, 2007). In particular, popular images of leadership are disseminated on these sites, which shape how individuals come to see and enact their identities as ‘leaders’ (Guthey and Jackson, 2005; Liu et al., 2016; Mccabe and Knights, 2016; Sveningsson and Larsson, 2006).

Data collection and analysis

The research was conducted over a 6-month period and involved compiling and analysing a text corpus derived from the CSL website, including information about the Centre’s various leadership courses, promotional videos and alumni profiles. While web-based corpora continue to be underutilised in the social sciences, they offer an important resource for critical discourse analysts in understanding the generative power of organisational discourse (Mautner, 2005).

The full data set for this study consisted of 231 web-based texts created by CSL, including 19 web articles, 55 alumni profiles, 15 videos and 142 images. We adopted a theoretical sampling strategy (Corbin and Strauss, 2008) to source web-based data that provided insights into the Centre’s representation of sustainability leaders. The main criterion for including a text was that it had to convey meanings about what sustainability leadership meant and/or how it was practised. All texts were downloaded for archival and catalogued in an Excel spreadsheet.

In analysing our data, we sought to understand how the identities of sustainability leaders are discursively instantiated when audiences (actual or imagined) are addressed (Bakhtin, 1981). We identified the first-order codes by moving iteratively between the data and emergent constructs of sustainability leadership identities, which included references to ‘renunciation’, ‘catalyst’, ‘self-discovery’, ‘self-empowerment’ and ‘building a followership’. We considered the use of literary devices in CSL’s web content (e.g. metaphors, tropes, characters and plots) as well as paying attention to the ways in which the key constructs were depicted audio-visually. These first-order codes revealed unexpected parallels between the CSL participants’ identities and the enlightenment narrative of Buddha, leading us to further aggregate and refine these codes into three second-order narrative stages of Calling, Awakening and Transforming. Our data structure is presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Data structure.

Sustainability leadership as a journey of enlightenment

The becoming of a leader has variously been associated with a hero’s journey where individuals – akin to mythical characters such as Ulysses and Beowulf – depart from their ordinary lives, face opponents and ordeals on their path and finally return home with the treasures they discovered and/or conquered (Olsson, 2006; Sinclair, 2007). The leadership archetypes that are promoted through such narratives are important as they offer ‘scripts and staging instructions for future performances’ (Czarniawska, 1998: 20).

In our data, we found that ‘the path’ to green leadership was, at its core, depicted as a journey of spiritual enlightenment. Although Buddhism was not explicitly cited by the programme participants nor did it appear to be a deliberate development model, parallels between CSL narratives and Buddhist mythology surfaced increasingly in the data analytic process. In recognising this salience, we regard the Buddhist narrative of enlightenment (or more precisely, its Western interpretations) as a root narrative or ‘masterplot’ that forms part of the cultural repertoire of stories from which CSL and their development programme participants can draw in their ongoing identity construction (Watson, 2009).

Key motifs of the Buddha narrative resonated with the construction of ‘sustainability leaders’ in our data in a variety of ways. Three stages, in particular, characterised sustainability leaders’ developmental journey, which we refer to here as (1) Calling, (2) Awakening and (3) Transforming.

Calling

For as long as I can remember, I have felt a need to ‘save the world’. That feeling has taken me along many pathways over the years – inspiring me to travel, explore, talk with many people, visit many landscapes, trial and evolve closer toward an intersection where I can work, and have the greatest impact possible. (CSL graduate)

In Buddhist mythology, Prince Siddhartha is depicted as an individual with exceptional talents who from an early age became attuned to the suffering of others. Unlike others in a similarly privileged position, he felt a calling to alleviate it. This notion of a calling was apparent in the social construction of ‘sustainability leaders’ in our data. The Centre’s promotional rhetoric positions their participants as individuals who are inherently gifted with environmental awareness and destined to become ‘future makers’ or ‘change makers’ – a trope that is foregrounded through bold headings. In the Centre’s alumni profiles, some participants describe an innate sense of leadership (‘even as a child, I have always been the kind of person who actively seeks out positive change, improvement and innovation’), while others construct themselves as having become inspired to ‘make a difference’ through the gradual development of life events (‘I can’t pinpoint any one particular moment that pushed me to want to become a ‘change maker’, but it’s been a combination of a lot of things – my upbringing in the country, family experiences, travelling through developing countries, being passionate about human rights’).

Both of these discursive positions, that is, being ‘born’ as a sustainability leader and having come to sustainability leadership through life and/or professional experiences, mirror Siddhartha’s depiction as a unique individual who is, on one level, innately concerned for and equipped to address the suffering of others, while at the same time destined to reach full enlightenment. Parallels to Siddhartha’s story also surfaced in the way in which some alumni foregrounded experiences that prompted them to renounce their previous ‘ignorant’ lives. In the Buddha narrative, this involved experiences such as witnessing old age, sickness and death and meeting a monk who had given up his desire for worldly pleasures. Similarly, the identity narratives of sustainability leaders included many experiences that acted as catalysts for their personal commitment to sustainability leadership:

I have had many moments in my life where I have been inspired to be a change maker, none more profound than when I saw the management of waste on my island home with mature eyes. Waste is bundled together largely unsorted, burnt in an open burn pit and then dumped directly into the ocean. … My heart broke and I made it my mission to educate myself and change this sickening practice. There must be a better way, a way where humans can live with minimal impact on the natural world. We must find that way. (CSL graduate)

The audiovisual discourses on the Centre’s website heighten a sense of excitement in their framing of exemplary sustainability leaders as bold risk-takers who put their integrity above material wealth. This can be seen in the video profile of an entrepreneur who is introduced as a former consultant in the resource sector (https://vimeo.com/13930907). An intertitle appears, drawing on the documentary genre to enhance the sense of trustworthiness and ‘truth’ of the piece. White text against a black background states that he ‘left behind a lucrative career consulting for the oil industry because he was concerned about global warming and wanted to take action’. The text then fades to a headshot of the leader, who appears to be in a busy contemporary art gallery, reiterating how he ‘quit that life’ and devoted himself to working for Greenpeace before starting his own solar energy company. Meanwhile, high-tempo percussive music plays in the background, creating a sense of dynamism and energy, mirroring the idea of a man who marches to the beat of his own drum.

The contrasting gallery setting suggests that while he may have renounced his career in the oil industry, he has not had to give up the luxuries of his upper-class lifestyle. The video invites prospective participants of the development programme to a meaningful leadership destiny, celebrates their inherent courage in rejecting the corporate status quo, but in a twist to the Buddha narrative, promises the participants the material comforts that they may be accustomed to in their existing life.

Awakening

I think CSL gave all of us the time, the space and a community to discover our gifts and talents … and orientate us towards opportunities to give them away, and be awesome. (CSL graduate)

Akin to Prince Siddhartha, sustainability leaders undergo a process of spiritual enlightenment, and in this, the Centre and its offerings, are framed as playing a pivotal role in bringing about the participants’ awakening. The Centre is constructed to achieve this through providing a means for the participants’ self-discovery (‘CSL has opened up a creative side that years of academic study, wonky approach to work and words were suppressing’) and by supporting the confidence and self-belief of its participants which is constructed as a form of self-empowerment (‘I walked away believing I can make a difference and I know what I stand for. I can make change happen’).

In the Centre’s web materials, self-discovery is depicted as a reflective process. Much as Prince Siddhartha who is often characterised as thinking deeply about his environment and the suffering of his fellow human beings (exemplified perhaps most iconically in the Buddha’s meditative pose), sustainability leaders are constructed as reflective practitioners. The Centre’s promotional video materials show (predominantly young) individuals journalling in nature settings. A sense of connection between the self and the environment is here framed as being central to sustainability leadership and this connection is strengthened through the act of reflection.

Olsson (2006: 197) reminds us that an archetype of leadership is not ‘a reflection of an individual personality but a social construction’. Central to this construction in our data is the story of individuals who are empowered to find purpose in their lives by meeting like-minded participants and developing confidence and self-belief in their goals (‘I feel better aligned with myself, my aspirations and my day to day life’):

As a 30 year old woman, I still feel like I’m trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up! CSL has given me knowledge, support, ideas, and encouragement to discover how I will align my skills with my passion. I can’t say I’ve totally figured it out, but I feel equipped with the tools to do so! (CSL graduate)

An important part of this empowerment is the strength and support that participants gain from meeting other like-minded participants (‘CSL connected me with an amazing network of people who share my passions, interests and drive to create a better world’). Fellow participants can be seen as playing the role of supporting characters in the hero narrative, offering inspiration and support to the lead character (‘the Fellowship Program showed me I wasn’t floating in this swamp alone. I was floating with other change-makers, brainy warriors and nurturing supporters’).

The Centre’s rhetoric further supports the participants’ self-discovery and self-empowerment by repeatedly foregrounding the power of individuals in shaping the future. Social and environmental transformation is grounded in transforming select individuals by equipping them with the necessary tools and providing a positive vision for the future. In the video ‘Make Change Happen’ (https://vimeo.com/109088544), multimodal devices are carefully configured to construct an optimistic outlook on what individuals can achieve. The video uses imagery of participants in nature settings (e.g. walking through a forest and strolling past rivers), underlain by mid-tempo, country-style instrumental music. Several of the Centre’s facilitators offer vocal segments:

What I love seeing in people is the transformation that they go through from day one to the last day of the program. They are really discovering their own power. Their own ability to make change on the things that they care about most deeply.

Transforming

I’m going to continue to immerse myself amongst the great sustainability kings and queens. I’m going to read, and watch and listen and learn as much as I can. I’m going to create stories that work as catalysts to provoke and empower future leaders. I’m going to move people. I’m going to create positive change for my future self. (CSL graduate)

Buddha was said to not have been regarded as a prophet or deity in his time, but rather, lived as a teacher for 45 years after his enlightenment (Olson, 2005). He travelled across many villages and cities to share his wisdom with a compassionate view to end the suffering of his students (Fields, 1992). Similarly, graduates of the Centre’s programme are constructed as empowered individuals who now possess the capacity to make ‘a significant impact locally, nationally and globally in the creation of sustainable change’. This narrative is promoted through a range of videos and interviews that showcase the alumni’s plans and achievements upon completion of the programme while casting – centre stage – the power of the self in creating change. We found, in particular, three prominent ways this change was constructed in the graduates’ identity narratives.

First, many graduates emphasise their desire to influence and inspire others to create change, thus sharing the knowledge they had acquired and creating a wider followership on sustainability issues in their field (e.g. ‘I want to help mobilise communities to engage with marine science and sustainability to create innovative and collaborative solutions for positive change’). The graduates, overwhelmingly, position themselves as transformers who are able to craft their own future and thereby shape the future of their environment (‘I put on my change maker boots and never took them off’).

Second, while a strong sense of agency permeates the graduates’ accounts, there is also an emphasis on the need for continuing the journey of self-discovery and self-development (‘I will continue to build my skills as a designer, growing my ability to create social impact on a larger scale’). An important aspect of the discursive construction of sustainability leadership is the unique vision and set of strengths and abilities that individuals bring to their future endeavours. Accordingly, the Centre’s alumni stress the need to continue their journey of self-discovery, further their skills and refine their sense of purpose:

I want to fortify and strengthen who I am and where I am at by focusing on the things I really want to achieve and solidifying where I want to go. This will involve self reflection, self care and a focus on stabilising my relationships so I have strong roots from which to grow. (CSL graduate)

Sustainability leaders are seen as ‘strong’, ‘adaptable’ and ‘resilient’ and while uniquely positioned to become a ‘future maker’ through undergoing the programme, there is an emphasis on their need for well-being and renewal (‘I’m practicing “sustainability starts with me” and taking time out for re-energising, building resiliency and having more fun’).

A third theme apparent in the data was the graduates’ focus on leveraging their skills to build meaningful careers and/or businesses. Transforming, in this sense, means becoming invested in ventures that give life purpose through contributing to broader sustainability goals (‘having just graduated, I want to find a job that fulfils my personal values and contributes to a movement that I see as powerful and growing’). The graduates’ accounts highlight future plans such as starting a consulting business, launching a landscaping studio and moving forward with other ‘innovative and collaborative projects that aim to create ripple effects for economic, environment and community development’. Thus, in short, sustainability leaders play a transformative role by finding ecocentric ways to strengthen their existing or emerging careers.

The audiovisual discourses of the Centre focus most saliently on this final theme of the sustainability leader narrative. Of the 15 videos on the Centre’s website, 10 are interviews with exemplary sustainability leaders who represent successful cases of having answered the call to sustainability leadership and are now changing the world for the better with their ecocentric businesses and activism. Although the Centre is based in Australia, it presents a diverse sample of leaders working in Australia, Denmark, Tanzania, the United States and the United Kingdom. The video utilises the effect of montage, for example, slowly filling up a frame with photographs of the leader working in exotic locales like what appears to be the Serengeti or meeting famous icons such as Queen Elizabeth II (https://vimeo.com/14021402). Atmospheric background music is further punctuated by sound effects of wildlife pertinent to the exotic settings shown. These montages are then contrasted with clips of a more familiar Western city in which the leader lives, accompanied by the sound of busy traffic or pedestrians that allude to ideas of industry and community, respectively. These videos emphasise the global reach of sustainability leaders and enhance their construction as cosmopolitan individuals, leading glamorous globetrotting lifestyles. An overview of the three narrative stages comparing the resonant motifs in the Buddhist enlightenment story with further exemplars of CSL narrative identities is presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Summary of enlightenment narratives.

Stages of the journey	Buddhist mythology	Centre for Sustainability Leadership
Calling	Gautama felt something was missing and became drawn to the world beyond his palace walls. When he ventured outside to the streets of Kapilavastu, he encountered a sick man, an old man, a dead man and a monk. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for his encounter with illness, old age, death and loss of material possessions. He resolved to leave behind his privileged life in search of the answer to suffering.	‘I have always been concerned about the future of the world and how humans are going to live more sustainably on it. But I think the moment I realised that I needed to help solve the world’s energy crisis was as a teenager while watching an episode of Foreign Correspondent about Texaco pillaging Ecuador’s rainforest communities for its oil. I couldn’t believe that companies could get away with such terrible things. Since then I’ve been interested in just about every alternative fuel source available’.
Awakening	Gautama became a wandering ascetic for 6 years, determined in his arduous training in meditation and austerity. Although he endured the ravages of the ascetic lifestyle, it ultimately proved to be ineffective to his purpose. He eventually rejected this approach and found shelter beneath the Bodhi tree and began to meditate. It was said that during his meditation he battled cosmic forces that sought to unseat him, but he overcame all distractions. After seven days of meditation, he reached enlightenment as the Buddha (the Awakened One).	‘When I look at the world around me and when I reflect on my experiences and the fulfilment I have got from immersing myself in different cultural and natural environments, I see the need to redefine what we call wealth and happiness. We need to evolve towards new paradigms based on equality of all species and intrinsic value of human and non-human lives. According to these paradigms, wealth means diversity of species, gender, ideas, and cultures. We value natural ecosystems and we collaborate fairly with other species. We recognise collective intelligence, and we are driven by a sense of stewardship of the world we live in. Therefore, waste does not exist. I see promoting these paradigms as my purpose in life’.
Transforming	Buddha was said to not have been regarded as a prophet or deity in his time, but rather, lived as a teacher for 45 years after his enlightenment. He travelled across many villages and cities to share his wisdom with a compassionate view to end the suffering of his students.	‘I am currently feeling like I am at an intersection with many different pathways; that all potentially make up my journey. I will explore further my options within the next two months. My first path is spending two weeks woofing [willing workers on organic farms] in New Zealand before Christmas in a self-sustainable farm and natural horsemanship centre, to get a feeling for a rural lifestyle. Other avenues include to keep working on Kenitra Project, and investigate social enterprise projects overseas in Morocco and Turkey, or finally doing a PhD preferably in Turkey around the topic of social and environmental entrepreneurship toconnect back with my Turkish roots’.

Discussion

This article has examined the web-based multimodal discourses of CSL, a sustainability leadership development centre, to explore how sustainability leadership identities are constructed. We found that ‘sustainability leaders’ are fashioned via a Buddhist enlightenment root narrative through which they traverse three sequential stages comprising (1) Calling, (2) Awakening and (3) Transforming.

In the first Calling stage, sustainability leaders are constructed like Prince Siddhartha as intrinsically concerned for and equipped to address the suffering of the world. Our analysis showed that some leaders in particular relay a disillusionment with business as usual and renounce successful careers, so they may answer the call to environmental enlightenment. In the second stage, leaders reach Awakening through the Centre, constructed around processes of self-discovery and self-empowerment. The celebratory discourses of CSL emphasise each participants’ unique power in realising their vision of the future. Although a key element of this is the notion that participants gain a ‘community’ through the Centre’s alumni network, this construction fixes chiefly upon the self as the heroic protagonist of the story, while their peers are relegated to the role of supporting characters. The third and final stage of Transforming sees sustainability leaders fulfilling their destiny to change the world. However, unlike Buddha, CSL discourses reject the notion that leaders need to give up worldly pleasures and instead construct these enlightened individuals as earning recognition and acclaim. Sustainability in this context is thus not a radical renunciation of the capitalist status quo but an ethos to enhance a successful and prosperous professional career. The enduring theme of the self continues to undergird this final stage as sustainability leaders are framed as committed to the lifelong journey of self-discovery.

The sequential development of this identity narrative is pivotal to its construction. For instance, there were no examples on the CSL website where a participant was framed as ignorant about or disinterested in environmental sustainability (not having yet been ‘called’) before they arrived at the development centre. Likewise, we did not find any cases where participants were said to have already made ecologically driven changes to their career or impact on their communities prior to completing the programme. CSL thus positions itself as the catalyst for the making of sustainability leaders; providing the critical Awakening necessary to turn passionate, dedicated individuals into agentic ‘leaders’.

Moreover, the identity work presented through CSL discourses is one that is strongly connected to a moral dimension, where participants are oriented to not only being a leader but also being a ‘good’ leader (Taylor, 1989; Watson, 2009). The enlightenment narrative resonates with McAdams (1993, 2001) influential work on redemption sequences, where individuals transform bad experiences into positive outcomes in their self-narratives (see also Creed et al., 2014). The redemption motif provided the hope that hard work will be rewarded in the future, which sustained individuals’ commitments to generative efforts such as societal change (McAdams, 2001). The enlightenment narrative differs from redemption sequences in that more emphasis is placed on individuals’ innate propensity to lead change than their efforts per se. Instead of striving for change, enlightenment is more about seeing one’s destiny for transformation unfold.

We position our study among critical studies of leadership development (Carroll and Levy, 2010; Nicholson and Carroll, 2013; Sveningsson and Larsson, 2006; Warhurst, 2012) and extend this body of literature in two ways. First, our article problematises the notion of individual hyperagency that underpins popular discursive constructions of sustainability leadership. We have demonstrated how rising constructs of ecologically oriented leadership reproduce essentialist and individualist notions of leadership that too quickly glorify individuals as saviours from environmental degradation. This discourse is further aided by the leadership narratives’ emphasis on career development, eschewing the material deprivation in the Buddhist root narrative and promising material comforts to the neoliberal acolyte.

While shedding light on the limitations of this construct, we recognise that leadership development institutions are informed and constrained by the Grand Discourses of leadership and sustainability in our cultures that legitimise individualist fantasies of hyperagency (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000; Grant et al., 2004). Our analysis of these overarching Grand Discourses is not to imply the participants are knowingly or willingly motivated by the co-construction of their individual heroism. Rather, the rhetoric of hyperagency within sustainability leadership discourse reflects the hegemony of neoliberalism in our society. With market rationalities coming to define social and environmental relations (McRobbie, 2008), sustainability here is commodified as a rational and moral tool for career development. Neoliberalism in this sense subsumes environmental sustainability ideals in its ongoing construction as the most legitimate way to engage with the world (Wright and Nyberg, 2012). Likewise, the commercial appeal of leadership development (Mabey, 2013) comes to shape the ways by which sustainability principles and practices are inculcated, where heroic, hyperagentic individualism helps developers (both literally and figuratively) sell their programmes.

Given these dominant social meanings, we do not intend to place the onus for resistance solely on the institutions involved, whose need for public funding and participant attraction is limited by their ability to resonate with heroic Grand Discourses. Power/knowledge operates as a productive ‘network of relations’ (Foucault, 1979: 26) in which ‘everybody is caught’ (Foucault, 1980: 119) while also being implicated in re-affirming, re-enacting, and transforming it (Clegg et al., 2006; Heizmann, 2011). The self-perpetuating nature of neoliberalism, however, closes down our imagination of radical possibilities. The solution to environmental degradation (underpinned by neoliberal ideals of individualism and endless consumption) becomes then almost inevitably a neoliberal one (enshrined in individualistic heroism and leadership). However, this may detract from the need for broader systemic and structural changes, including policies and governance mechanisms that regulate consumption and production patterns and decouple our use of natural resources from the economic growth paradigm.

Second, we highlight the ways visual and audio discursive devices combine to inform the construction of leadership identities. Our analysis showed how identity creation occurs through both video and verbal devices, where, for example, verbal discourses can communicate the renunciation of corporate practices, while the video cues more subtly assure the viewer of material comfort and success. It was also through the combination of communicative modes that the Centre’s discursive activities exercised their generative power effects – that is, through creating the lure of a reflective, self-empowered and cosmopolitan identity. By analysing audiovisual texts in addition to the verbal, we have therefore attempted to show the interactive processes by which sustainability leadership is brought into being, thus answering the call for more multimodal analyses of organisational discourse that attend to the multitude ways by which language is used in contemporary media (Bell and Davison, 2013; Iedema, 2007; Mccabe and Knights, 2016).

Future studies could extend the findings in this article by exploring participant experiences with sustainability development programmes such as CSL. The concern of our study was with CSL’s discursive construction of what it means to be a ‘sustainability leader’, which informs but cannot determine how participants actively negotiate their identities (Watson, 2009). Future research could examine more closely the social processes of identity co-construction between developers and participants. Our understanding would also be enriched through empirical studies of sustainability leadership development programmes that may attempt to challenge individualist leadership ideals. In-depth analysis, such as through case study methods, could provide insight into how sustainability leadership institutions negotiate dominant meanings around sustainability and leadership to satisfy participant and funder expectations while seeking radical change of corporate and social practices. As ‘discursive activity structures the social space within which actors act’ (Hardy and Phillips, 2004: 304), this could shed light on alternative leadership identities and forms of action within the discursive space of sustainability.

Towards leadership-as-practice development for sustainability

While we have critiqued the dominance of heroism in discourses of sustainability leadership, the critical constructionist literature has begun to sketch, at least conceptually, what alternative forms of sustainability leadership and leadership development might look like, thus offering important insights into the realm of possibility that lies in looking beyond individualist conceptions of leadership in the field of sustainability (Allen et al., 2017; Denyer and James, 2016; Kurusz et al., 2014; Raelin 2011).

The emerging ‘leadership-as-practice’ paradigm (Raelin, 2016, Carroll et al., 2008), in particular, offers a promising departure from the conceptual thinking of traditional leadership development programmes that are geared towards developing sets of predetermined and generalised competencies in individuals. The starting point in this alternative form of leadership development may be the fostering of ‘collaborative leadership learning groups’ (Denyer and James, 2016) that focus on the development of sustainable ‘practices, processes and interactions’ (Crevani et al., 2010: 78) in the respective organisational contexts. ‘Change’ is here ‘not achieved through the implementation of a known process … but requires the disruption of existing patterns and experimentation to enable emergent futures’ (Denyer and James, 2016: 266).

On an individual level, leadership-as-practice development involves building learners’ critical, self-reflexive capacities to challenge underlying beliefs that shape, and often constrain, their situated contexts (e.g. the primacy of business rationalities, individualist notions of leadership). What learners are exposed to here is a view of leadership as a form of ‘collaborative agency’ (Raelin, 2016) that emerges in specific relational contexts, often in everyday ‘unheroic’ situations, and at different levels of the organisation (Liu, 2017). This may be coupled with fostering in participants an ‘ethic of care’ (Gabriel, 2009; Gilligan, 2013; Kurusz et al., 2014) to support the complex web of social, material and ecological relations that sustain life in small, everyday acts. At the same time, it may also include building an awareness of the limits of (situated) sustainability leadership as a vehicle for change and the more fundamental need for broader socio-structural responses (Banerjee, 2008; Springett, 2003). In this way, individual agency may be ‘released’ from the techno-centric, neoliberal discourses, practices and dispositions into which it has been socialised (Raelin, 2016).

Conclusion

To conclude, this article has examined the important role leadership development plays in the idealisation and co-creation of sustainability leadership identities. Ecological phenomena such as climate change are increasingly seen as ‘wicked’ problems of unequalled social importance that require complex human responses (Gallagher, 2016; Gosselin et al., 2016). However, little attention has been paid to the interplay between the discursive activities of sustainability actors and the broader power/knowledge relations to which these contribute (Wright et al., 2012). It is in this context that our findings point towards the dialectic tensions between the discursive claims of (sustainability) leadership developers and the neoliberal regimes they seek to transform. Heroic and spiritual framings of sustainability leadership allow the laudable but complex work of environmental sustainability to be collapsed into development programmes that celebrate and, arguably, overplay participants’ capabilities to single-handedly solve environmental problems (cf. Bolden and Gosling, 2007; Carroll et al., 2008). Ironically, the foregrounding of a heroic pursuit of ‘goodness’ found in sustainability leadership discourse may thereby reinforce the very ‘preoccupation with the self’ (Knights and O’Leary, 2006: 128) that is entrenched in neoliberal regimes and underlies our disconnection from nature (Phillips and Rumens, 2015; Wright and Nyberg, 2014, 2015).

Footnotes

Funding

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

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