The Psychology of the Sustainability Transition

Matthijs Bal and Andy Brookes

In our previous blog, we presented the case for a transition from our current unsustainable ways of organizing our societies and economies towards a new sustainable era. While all societal stakeholders have a role to play, it is businesses which generally have been rather reluctant to meaningfully engage with the transition to “truly” sustainable business models, and not to fall back to the greenwashing types of transitioning, which are full of promise, yet usually without much actual constative meaning beyond the protection of the status-quo. The recent news about the record profits Shell has made in the last year, the same year of the Ukraine war, an energy and inflation crisis which hit an ever-growing group of vulnerable people at the bottom end of societal income, testifies not just of the absurdity of such record profits, but the inherent rotten nature of the structures themselves: if we live in a society where this is possible, we simply have to say No! No, we do not want to participate in societies where such inequalities manifest in brutal ways – redistributing economic profit to companies and shareholders at the expense of the vast majority of people, who have to suffer.

This also shows how the grand problems of our global society are inherently interconnected: while climate breakdown urges the world to rapidly decarbonize, the actually existing practice of the fossil-fuel industry making record profits shows that extractive capitalism still trumps everything, at the expense of growing inequalities. The fossil fuel industry’s great theft of natural resources throughout the world, while creating natural destruction and depriving local people of the profits generated,  shows that only radical change can bring actual progress to a fairer world. However, terms such as the need for ‘radical change’ may not enable us to make those necessary changes, even when used by powerful institutions such as the UN (see for instance the UN report ‘The Closing Window’). Hence, while we know now that a rapid transformation to a more sustainable society is a matter of human survival, at the same time, we seem more and more unable to even capture language into meaning, while terminology such as ‘radical change’ and ‘rapid system-wide transformation’, no matter how important they are, lose their constative meaning in a void dictated by the absurd gap between discourse and reality. In other words, we are doomed as language itself fails: no matter how much we emphasize the urgency of the need for action, it never actually reaches its destination, and change seems more and more unlikely the more we become embedded into our societal downfall. Recently, it has been the first time in Matthijs’ academic career of almost 20 years that a student asked him about the collapse of society and civilization – students are losing hope as well. So what is to be done? How to get out of this mess, and find meaningful ways to actually build sustainable organisations?

Key to the process of transforming our organisations to become sustainable is imagination: why is it so difficult to transform our organisations? In the absence of desire for alternative ways of living and working, we retreat into the known certainties of what we have and where we are. The lack of imagination keeps the status-quo intact and therefore, any initiative that aims to play a small part in the transformation process is bound to be sucked up by capitalist logic. The challenge therefore is to imagine non-capitalist ways of living, beyond the notion of circulation and reproduction of capital as the driving force in our lives. But it is important to be precise here: capitalism is always able to transform itself, and adapt to new realities. With the rise of digital society, we have seen how capitalist logic has been inherent to its rise, dictating the very principles of how digital lives are led. New innovations enter our lives, and are formed through and by capitalism. In a similar vein, the  capitalist logic continues to dictate the response to climate breakdown, and our task at this very point is to narrate non-capitalist life, to showcase how it can be done differently. Hence, we need new paradigms, new ideas about how we construct our world.

One such way may be a dignity-paradigm: in such a view, utility or economic profit is no longer primary in the functioning of organizations, but the protection and promotion of dignity in the workplace (Bal, 2017). Central to the notion of organising is the question how organising can take place such that it protects the dignity of people and the planet as such. This perspective departs from a simple question: how does our behaviour affect the dignity of the planet, including people, animals, resources, and nature? In the quest for more sustainable organisations, the transformation can only take place if every aspect of organising is scrutinized and confronted with the ‘dignity question’. In this way, the transformation to sustainable organisations is approached holistically: the necessary transformation is not just about reducing carbon footprint of our economic activity, but about the dignity of people and the planet. Hence, for each aspect of organisational life, dignity is in question: how organising itself takes place (i.e. in a more democratic, dignified manner), and how relationships with stakeholders in the broadest sense are maintained and ‘managed’. In a capitalist paradigm, business activity is defined through instrumental, and profit-driven logic, while a dignity paradigm provides a way through which concrete answers can be generated to the biggest questions we are facing around the sustainability transformation of our societies. For instance, production, supply chains, finance, employment relationships and marketing are all defined using capitalist logic, while a dignity paradigm would inform each of these through postulating a straightforward question (with a complex answer nonetheless): what is the most dignified way to organise production? What is the best way to set up a supply chain that protects and promotes the dignity of all people involved, as well as nature, animals, and our natural resources? These questions ought to be leading in organisational practices and decision making processes.