Business makes a ‘journey’ out of ‘sustainability’: creating adventures in Wonderland?

This paper provides a critical exploration of the ‘journey metaphor’ promoted in much business discourse on sustainability in corporate reports and advertisements, and in commentators’ reports in the political and professional business literature. The portrayal of sustainability as a journey evokes images of corporate adaptation, learning, and a movement away from business-as-usual practices. The journey metaphor, however, masks the issue of towards what it is that businesses are actually, or even supposedly, moving. It is argued that business is constructing ‘sustainability’ as a journey to avoid specifying some future desirable state of affairs. We suggest that by portraying ‘sustainability’ in this way, businesses, and the related political and professional literature, have invoked a subtle and powerful, use of language that appears to seriously engage with elements of the discourse around sustainable development and sustainability. Yet at the same time, by constructing and promoting its own version of the discourse, it de-emphasises discussion of desirable future states of living, and neatly sidesteps any debate about, or need to radically change course. The paper illustrates how journeying is invoked throughout corporate reports and other forms of business communication in a process of corporate myth-making. Businesses are shown to be constructing a “wonderland” discourse. Business Makes a ‘Journey’ out of ‘Sustainability’: Creating Adventures in Wonderland? “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? ” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where―”, said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “―so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough. Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here? ” “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad. ” “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. ” “How do you know I’m mad? ” said Alice. “You must be," said the Cat, “or you wouldn't have come here. ” (Alice’sAdventuresinWonderland, Lewis Carroll) Introduction Although business interest in the concept of sustainability appears to be increasing worldwide, there is considerable evidence in academic, professional and business literature that sustainability is an elusive concept with which to engage (Barbier, 1987, 1989; Dixon & Fallon, 1989; Gladwin, Kennelly & Krause, 1995; Milne, 1996; Pearce et al, 1989; O’Riordan, 1991; Redclift, 1987; & Zorvanyi 1998). How business renders its engagement with such a concept sensible through presenting it as a journey is the subject of this paper. The sustainability journey is, we contend, both a prevalent metaphor in businesses’ representations of their engagement with sustainability and a powerful one that predisposes understanding of sustainability as some kind of process rather than as a particular kind of end-state. Like Alice, above, in her conversation with the Cheshire Cat, business discourse on sustainability appears less concerned with an ultimate destination than with a journey to somewhere relatively undefined. The Cheshire Cat’s final remark nicely captures the present predicament we might be facing as a species. "You must be [mad] or you wouldn’t have come here" raises the question of whether a rational species would choose to get to the point where it is addicted to growth, consumption and other patterns of thinking and action that ultimately may threaten its very own existence. Understanding why and how business makes sense of such madness through a particular discursive practice is our purpose here, following an emergent tradition of research on accounting and organizational representations of environment and sustainability (e.g., Newton & Harte, 1997; Levy, 1997; Banerjee, 2001; See Welford, 1998 on the need for a critical research agenda in this arena). A thin vein of this research has utilized discourse analysis (see, for example, Everett & Neu, 2000: Livesey, 2001, 2002a & b;,Livesey & Kearins, 2002; and Banerjee 2003). Our analysis examines the presence of the journey metaphor analyzing its usage in specific contexts, and its potential power effects in possibly forestalling the radical change that many commentators (e.g., Shrivastava, 1994; Shrivastava & Hart, 1995; Welford, 1995, 1997 &