Shengsi pilao y Liaozhai zhiyi: una comparación

Emergent corporate sustainability can be seen where coherence develops between the embedded, embodied and enacted levels of corporate sustainability. Each level of system will be discussed. As a fourth wave or Promethean approach to corporate sustainability, emergent corporate sustainability focuses on embedding sustainability in the business whilst broadening the focus to embody sustainability at the level of agent in order for sustainability to be enacted.

Embedded level

This level considers how sustainability is embedded in the business, whereby sustainability is mainstreamed into business activities and sustainability challenges are translated into business opportunities. This requires the business to move towards a co-evolutionary interaction with its environment.

The embedded level is addressed in a rigorous manner as per third wave (Achillean corporate sustainability) and extended into fourth wave (Promethean corporate sustainability). The embedded domain is ultimately about transforming the firm for a better functional fit with the containing systems (Metcalf & Benn, 2012).

Embedding sustainability develops through various stages. So, whilst the literature review in this chapter considered waves of emergence in corporate sustainability in the academic

embed sustainability, and thus are useful for understanding the level at which sustainability needs to be embedded in Promethean corporate sustainability.

Whilst a critique of developmental theories is beyond the scope of this chapter, Edwards (2010) developed a stage model from a synthesis of van Marrewijk and Werre (2003), and Dunphy, Griffiths, and Benn (2003), incorporating Graves’s (1974) evolutionary progression of value structures, which are indicated as preconventional, conventional, postconventional and post-postconventional levels in Table 2.7.

The development of corporate sustainability, which Edwards (2010) refers to as organisational sustainability, can be seen to transcend through stages in an inclusive way in which formative stages are included within later stages, resulting in increasing levels of complexity and

integrative forms of organisational sustainability (Edwards, 2010). Despite a general direction towards more complex and integrative forms of organisational sustainability, an emergent approach suggests a multiplicity of pathways for development. Fourth wave forms of corporate sustainability are associated with postconventional levels and upwards.

Stages of sustainability

Stages of organisational sustainability

Description of stage

Preconventional Subsistent organisation Sustainability is about survival and maximisation of profit.

Avoidant organisation Sustainability as an attack by oppositional groups. Ignorance and apathy towards ethical standards and legal requirements.

Conventional Compliant organisation Sustainability as import; emphasises compliance to traditional ethical and legal standards.

Efficient organisation Sustainability is valued as a source of cost saving. Emphasises the business case for sustainability.

Postconventional Committed organisation Values sustainability as balancing of economic, social and environmental domains. Goes beyond legal compliance and sees the organisation as

interconnected systems.

Sustaining organisation (local)

Sustainability is seen and valued as a way of developing the organisation and its stakeholders. Transformational strategies are employed to move towards triple-bottom-line goals whilst supporting host communities despite regulatory

Sustainability is embedded in all aspects of the organisation and is perceived in global and intergenerational perspectives.

Sustainability relates to multiple levels of purpose (physical, economic,

environmental, emotional, social and spiritual).

Table 2.7: Stages of organisational sustainability Source: Edwards (2010, pp. 158–159)

Achieving postconventional and post-postconventional stages of organisational sustainability requires organisations to move beyond the integration or embedding of sustainability to incorporate embodied sustainability in which fundamental shifts in the functioning of the organisation as a complex adaptive system emerge as agents shift the perspective or ethos from which they operate. The development of value structures in sustainability leaders results in sustainability interventions being designed in a way that is grounded in transpersonal meaning, use of complexity approaches, and adaptive management of the intervention in dialogue with the system (Brown, 2011), highlighting a need for emphasis on embodiment.

Embodied level

The enduring disconnect between corporate sustainability activities and the ongoing decline in the environment suggests that embedding sustainability is necessary but insufficient to support the emergence of corporate sustainability. By extending our focus to consider how

sustainability is embodied, we are able to build a conceptual model to describe conditions in which self-organisation and emergence are more likely. Embodiment recognises that most thought is cognitively unconscious, in that the majority of cognition happens below conscious awareness, such as neuronal processes, which are not accessible to introspection (Lakoff &

Johnson, 1999). To create conditions that encourage the emergence of corporate sustainability, it is thus important to consider how corporate sustainability is embodied.

Embodiment considers cognition with respect to bodily experience:

"By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context” (Varela et al., 1991, pp. 172–173).

An embodied level of corporate sustainability suggests that an agent does not decide to enact sustainability in a purely rational and disembodied sense. Rather the “very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 3–4). Since corporate sustainability focuses on complex phenomena across wide temporal ranges and spatial scopes, agents may have a disembodied conceptual experience of important phenomena, potentially inhibiting action.

For corporate sustainability to be embodied, it must extend beyond the usual focus on upper right (behaviours) and lower right (systems), to include upper left (consciousness, worldviews) and lower left (culture). Wilber’s integral quadrants model is displayed in (a) in Figure 2.11.

Whereas an emphasis on all quadrants (c) results in the greatest potential for development, most organisations focus on exterior quadrants only (b), thereby compromising their

development (Putnik, 2009).

Figure 2.11: Wilber’s integral quadrants as developmental domains Source: Putnik (2009, p. 264)

Embodiment of corporate sustainability enables self-organisation by effecting sensorimotor capacities within the biological, psychological and cultural context of the agent. This level affects the self-organising structures of the agent as complex adaptive system, thereby enabling emergence through the enaction of sustainability across a network of agents. The next section will consider this enacted level of corporate sustainability.

Enacted level

The enacted level of corporate sustainability extends the notion of an embodied mind to consider embodied action in the context of the containing system. This is a crucial

consideration for corporate sustainability which needs to be enacted both in the context of a network of agents operating in concert and in interaction with the containing ecosystem. The

concept of enactment was introduced into cognitive science by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991, p. 9):

“We propose as a name the term enactive to emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs”.

This approach draws on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty by acknowledging a circularity between the self and the world (Varela et al., 1991), which is consistent with the holistic approach, involving both interior and exterior domains, of the Cassandra model (Baets &

Oldenboom, 2009) and the integral quadrants (Wilber, 2000). The guiding metaphor for this approach was drawn from the words of poet Antonio Machado: “Wanderer the road is your footsteps, nothing else; you lay down a path in walking” (Varela in Thompson, 2007, p. 13).

Enactment is thus a process of emergence, which shifts the discourse from one of the mind seeking to represent reality and using this representation to address the challenges associated with corporate sustainability, to the mind emerging through the coupling of organism and environment, as part of a co-evolutionary process. This approach suggests that “the human mind emerges from self-organizing processes that tightly interconnect the brain, body and environment at multiple levels” (Thompson, 2007, p. 37). In the context of corporate

sustainability, it is important to include the levels of individual, group, organisation, industry, socio-cultural environment and global environment, at each level considering both interiors and exteriors as an expanded version of the integral quadrants (Edwards, 2009). The enactive approach is based on five key ideas, which have been drawn from Thompson (2007):

1. Organisms are autonomous agents actively generating and maintaining themselves, thereby enacting their cognitive domains.

2. The nervous system of the organism is an autonomous dynamic system which generates and maintains coherent activity patterns and meaning as opposed to processing information.

3. Cognition is situated and embodied in action, whereby cognitive structures and

4. The contextual domain of the organism is enacted through autonomous agency and coupling between the organism and environment, as opposed to a prespecified world being represented by its brain.

5. Experience is central to understanding the mind.

Enactment suggests an emergent process which is inherently creative, as opposed to

conceptualising corporate sustainability as a predictable sequence of steps achieved through the management of a linear process of change. This perspective also implies that knowledge and know-how emerge from the co-evolutionary process itself rather than relying on

sustainable actions following from a process of knowledge transfer from expert to agent. This is essentially a phenomenological endeavour where “enaction is the idea that organisms create their own experience through their actions” (Hutchins & Alač, 2004, p. 428).