From movements to managers: discourse, jurisdictions, and positions in the field of sustainability

Augustine, Grace L

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jz3d-9f93

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From movements to managers: discourse, jurisdictions, and positions in the field of sustainability

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In three empirical chapters, this dissertation examines the field of sustainability over time, specifically uncovering the processes by which contentious interactions between movements and organizations can shift to the development of shared meaning and the creation of new organizational positions. The dissertation utilizes the analyses strategies of text analysis, field observations, interviews, and statistical modeling to investigate changes in discourse in the field of sustainability over time and the development and growth of sustainability manager positions that are tasked with managing movement-initiated work, in particular examining who comes to occupy these positions and how the individuals in them pursue or abandon efforts at movement-aligned changes inside their organizations. The empirical setting is primarily focused on sustainability in higher education, with one chapter utilizing a comparison case with sustainability in healthcare. Chapter 1 examines changes in discourse in an online forum about sustainability in higher education, and finds that the actors’ discourse starts out as disparate from one another, but eventually reaches discursive coherence regarding which issues are core to the field; however, this settlement excludes key actors, such as activists. Additionally, when the same set of issues is discussed to a similar degree across actors, there is actually greater disagreement over how those core issues should operate in the field; this indicates that actors in this field first worked towards a shared understanding of which issues are “worthy of debate” before proceeding to debate the content of those issues. Chapter 2 traces the development of the nascent occupational group of sustainability managers in higher education, who were established with a mandate from a social movement but without a clear set of tasks to carry out in their new roles. Through analyses of observations, interviews, and archival documents on the multi-stage creation of this occupational group’s jurisdiction, it becomes clear that the jurisdiction was crafted in large part through intra-occupational negotiation over task areas and that the occupational group worked to distance its jurisdiction in part from what the movement had envisioned, but continued to work behind-the-scenes, engaging in movement-aligned “insurgency work” within areas that they had cut from their formal jurisdiction. Chapter 3 follows the individuals who were involved early on in the fields of sustainability in higher education and healthcare (termed “field founders”) to examine who becomes a sustainability manager as these new positions are established and gain legitimacy over time. The results show that as the position gains legitimacy, field founders are more likely to become sustainability managers. In higher education, field founders from a movement-aligned background, who arguably represent the ideals of the field, are more likely to enter sustainability manager positions than those without a movement-aligned background, but this effect is negatively moderated by the degree of legitimacy of the position. In the healthcare sector, field founders with a movement-aligned background are no more likely to become sustainability managers than other field founders. A follow-up qualitative study of the founding of sustainability manager positions in the two sectors sheds light on potential reasons for these mixed results. Overall, the findings across the three chapters contribute to theories of movements and organizations, work and occupations, and fields.

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