What is Sustainability?

Sustainability is a contestable concept—it is more a symbol, a rallying point for a challenge to the dominance of neoliberal economics than a clearly specifiable philosophy. The conflicts in this century, as with economic progress in the last, will be to shape it and to work out its implications for social organization. Nevertheless we can attempt a definition.

Sustainability results from activities that

• Enhance the planet's ability to maintain and renew the viability of the biosphere and protect all living species.

• Enhance society's ability to maintain itself and to solve its major problems.

• Maintain a decent level of welfare for present and future generations of humanity.

• Extend the socially useful life of organizations so that they can contribute resources needed to achieve the aforementioned.

Sustainable organizations engage in these kinds of activities. We can no longer act as if the economy is a separable, independent entity from society and the ecology. Organizations are fundamental cells of the society and the ecology as well as the economy. The growing realization that this is so is leading to a change in the way business does business.^[6] Part of this redefinition is coming from social pressures for business to take more responsibility for its impact on the world and partly from new technologies that are already dematerializing production processes and reducing energy consumption. Whatever the causes, business leaders themselves are now providing much of the momentum for the change.

Economic liberalism has been the prevailing philosophy in Western economies in the last 20 years. It is, however, increasingly under challenge for its emphasis on short-term returns and lack of concern for long-term consequences; for its philosophy of “greed is good,” which emphasizes material wealth rather than fulfillment and spirituality; for its pursuit of shareholder wealth and neglect of the firm's other important stakeholders; for its penchant for externalizing to the general community the social and ecological costs of business decisions; and for its neglect of the collective good for private gain. A recent trenchant criticism of the exclusive obsession with shareholder interests as against stakeholder interests has been made, for example, by Kennedy in The End of Shareholder Value.^[7]

So I am arguing here that the new challenge for change agents is to provide corporate leaders with a blueprint for the way forward as we redesign organizations for the 21st century. The OD movement attempted this with some success in the last century; this century demands the development of new strategies to meet the emerging new problems.