Sustainability in a Social Constructivist Discourse

Sustainability in a Social Constructivist Discourse

It is common for economics students to learn that there is a rational person at the center of the model of our economy named Homo-Economicus or Rational Economic Man [1, 2]. Similarly, students of sustainable business are taught that sustainable development has three pillars: economic, social, and environmental [3]. However, both Homo-Economicus and the Triple Bottom Line are pedagogical constructs [4, 5]. Many researchers rely on models, which often rely on taken-for-granted common-sense conceptions and assumptions [6]. However, these models, especially those that describe social phenomena, are not direct reflections of the real world [6, 7].

Ruth Hines [6] eloquently illustrates the notion of social constructivism. She argues that reality does not concretely exist independently of the concepts, norms, language, and behaviour of people. Instead, people create a society, and their concepts, norms, language, and behaviour become institutionalized. Many authors recognize that the facts of society do not pre-exist social practices but are created and sustained by social action. In other words, our reality, or experience of reality, is constructed from and understood using categories that are validated and accepted by society. Crime, profit, madness, and other seemingly objective categories are actually socially constructed definitions of reality or “ways of seeing” [6].

Hines [6] flips and flops between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ social constructivism in her paper. She claims that “… the facts of society do not pre-exist social practices”; she also questions “[whether] ‘black holes’ and ‘subatomic particles’ exist[ed] before physics created the idea of them? Of course they did not!”. The former reflects the notion of ‘weak’ social constructivism and the latter’s ‘strong’ social constructivism. ‘Weak’ social constructivism posits that our experience of reality is constructed out of the categories by which we interpret and understand it [8–10]. ‘Strong’ social constructivism posits reality is quite literally constructed by us interpreting it through socially validated categories [8–11].

“The claim that we make our world is thus untenable. We create concepts and theories, but not the facts they purport to describe. These are mind-independent, a matter of the world just being as it is” [12]. The case for ‘strong’ social constructivism is illogical [11, 13] and “simply bankrupt” [9].

To prevent the infinite regress or circular reasoning that ‘strong’ social constructivism requires, I will draw an asymptote between what can and cannot be socially constructed. I will use Chisholm [14]’s steel man presentation of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects to do this. Objects may have one of three modalities of “being” or “not-being”: (i) existence — or actual reality, these objects have a material and temporal ‘being’; (ii) subsistence — these objects exist in a non-temporal sense; and (iii) absistence — being an object, but not having a ‘being’. To explain more clearly, certain objects can exist, such as a tree or a chair; others cannot exist on principle but may have physical manifestations, such as numbers or theories; these objects are said to subsist, while others still cannot even subsist, these are impossible objects such as unicorns or mountains made of gold, these objects are said to absist. To use more familiar terminology, objects that exist are self-identifying [12]; they have a tangible form. Objects that subsist and absist are not self-identifying; they do not have tangible form and exist only in our consciousness.

The asymptote I draw, the point at which the social constructivist view becomes illogical, is used to argue the construction of objects that exist. One cannot argue that a star or tree is a social construction; one can justly argue that theories and notions — such as sustainability — are social constructions. I will henceforth use the term social constructivism to refer to the ‘weak’ form, referring only to the social construction of subsistent and absistent beings.

“A general description of society is that society is communication” [7]. Humans would be incomprehensible to each other if it weren’t for communication. As Luhmann [7] shows, the typical case for communication is that of misunderstanding, much of the meaning we encode into the communication is not decoded by the communicatee. We are social beings who exist in interpretation communities. If not for a common language and a common ontological understanding of the categories in this language, we would do nothing other than continually talk past each other [15]. Meaning only arises within the language and a common interpretation community. “Language is a construction of reality … [it] does not reproduce reality, it interprets and creates realities” [7]

“As we describe and explain, so do we fashion our future” [7] The implication is that our language’s boundaries are the boundaries of our perception and experience of the world. As Hines [6] explains, our category of ‘organisation’ does not include the trees outside the fence; the word ‘organisation’ categorises things as being included in or excluded from said ‘organisation’. The boundary of the ‘organisation’ is the fence; this arbitrary boundary is imposed by the ontological essence of the word ‘organisation’, not by anything in the world that existed before the ‘organisation’ being described as such.

“A way of seeing is a way of not seeing” [16]; by placing things into categories, we close ourselves off from experiencing those things in any other way. Luhmann [7] proposes a shift of perspective — to look not for the ontological essence of things but to acknowledge the epistemic limits to knowledge. This de-ontologisation of reality leads to a more flexible and context-dependent intelligence and way of thinking.

Luc Ciompi [7] claims that we learn effectively through anchored programs; we do not learn facts. Our knowledge system has no direct contact with the outside world. Thus, learning is a self-regulated, emerging construction of reality. Constructivism explains the difficulty one often has when communicating knowledge to others. What is learned is often not the same as what was taught — an individual constructs their interpretation (or knowledge system) of reality based on one’s previous experiences and understanding.

What, then, are the implications for the sustainable business discourse? As Hines’ student exclaims, “There’s a lot more to it than I realised” [6]. How has the notion of sustainability been constructed over the last decades? How has this impacted sustainability reporting?

Throughout the 1970s, the discourse began to focus on the broader accountability of businesses [17]. Worker’s and union rights were advanced; there was increased participation and information sharing between businesses, workers and their unions, leading to improved working conditions and the ability for workers to enter management [17, 18]. Increased participation and legislation around the workplace were the kernels for what later became known as Corporate Social Responsibility and, more recently, incorporated into voluntary sustainability reporting [17].

Parallel to this, ecological issues enter the zeitgeist. Beginning with Rachael Carlson’s Silent Spring [19], which outlined how underregulated and overused pesticides would result in the death of birds and, thus, a season with no bird calls [20]. The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth [21, 22] and the Brundtland Report [23] were the seed for the 1992 Rio Summit [24] and the 2015 Paris Agreement [25] with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

John Elkington’s seminal article, Cannibals With Forks [3], introduced the notion of a triple bottom line (commonly referred to as the three pillars of sustainability [26]). This notion is now foundational to the sustainable business discourse [17]. One could argue that the narrative around progression from the 1970s to now is one of the visionaries creating a linear and functionalist account of sustainability, getting ever closer to the self-evident truths at the bottom. Larrinaga and Bebbington [17] lay out another perspective to view this ‘progression’ — a social constructivist perspective. They claim that our understanding of sustainability is constructed from how we communicate about it.

The trees that comprise the ecological pillar of sustainability exist and are self-identifying. Similarly, we humans constitute the social pillar. These pillars themselves and the notion of sustainability itself are not self-identifying. These subsist and are only brought about through us categorising them as such. As with Hines’ [6] organisation, they were categorised as such by the student’s essential understanding of an organisation, sustainability, and the pillars that comprise it.

Reidy explains that “sustainability is a future-oriented concept” [20] and calls for us to use scenario planning to imagine dystopian and desirable futures. The Club of Rome [20–22, 27] and, more recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [20, 27], along with other epistemic communities — including academics, experts (consultants), corporations, stakeholders, and policymakers — engaged in sustainability planning, thus acting as carriers of the constructivist discourse [17]. A natural next step for businesses was to begin reporting their sustainability initiatives.

In the 1970s, businesses began reporting their sustainability — the first iterations being value-added reporting, social audits and attempts to account for externalities [17]. The key issue became the problematisation of financial accounting (profit-seeking) and conservation of social and ecological capital; there are conflicting logics of sustainability reporting and business profitability. Sustainability became the operational description of social and ecological conservation [17]. The norms around sustainability reporting — what practices and expectations are realistic or even plausible — were created by a plurality of carriers [17, 20].

Larrinaga and Bebbington [17] take a constructivist view of sustainability reporting and outline a soft form of regulation in which organisations voluntarily partake. The Global Reporting Initiative emerged to describe what sustainability reporting should entail [17, 28]. Sustainability reporting has “become embedded in the operational routines and practices of hundreds of large companies in multiple countries” [28]. Similarly to how economic norms become institutionalised and reinforce themselves by inscribing subsequent actions [29], so does sustainability reporting [17, 20, 28].

The sustainability discourse, particularly business reporting on sustainability, is declining in variance, and shared language and metrics have emerged [17]. The more we talk about sustainability, the more we agree with it. Sustainability does not concretely exist independently from, nor pre-exist, social action. In other words, sustainability is constructed from and understood using institutionalised categories created and recognised by society.

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