Purpose -The aim of this paper is to conceptualize employees' sustainable work abilities, or their long-term adaptive and proactive abilities to work, farewell at work, and contribute through working. Sustainable work is defined as to promote the development in personal resources leading to sustainable work ability. Design/methodology/approach -The conceptual paper distinguishes vital personal resources underlying an employee's sustainable work ability and categorizes these resources with the help of integral theory. Collaborative work crafting was outlined as a tool to promote the development of personal resources and sustainable work ability. Findings -Sustainable work ability depends on personal resources relating to our human nature as both individual and communal beings with both interior and exterior worlds. Work crafting may create sustainable work in which existing personal resources are benefited from, developed further through learning, or translated into novel resources. Practical implications -When formal job descriptions and preplanned job design do not work in post-industrial work, traditional job design can be replaced by collaborative work crafting, which allows development in both work and employees. Originality/value -The paper synthesizes different types of personal resources needed for sustainable working and outlines their development processes, rather than adds one more theory to explain some specific aspect of well-being, development, and functioning. The paper offers one of the first definitions of sustainable work.

This paper outlines an approach to socially sustainable work organizations. Socially sustainable work organizations have a dynamic ability to function both by repeating accustomed and by devising innovative solutions, and they maintain this operational viability by promoting the functional capabilities of their stakeholders. The organizational and stakeholder functional capabilities are founded on complexity stemming from the simultaneous uniqueness and integration of resources. It is argued that traditional socio‐ technical systems (STSs) approaches do not offer optimal foundations for achieving sustainability. Instead, a migration into chaordic systems thinking (ChST) is proposed. It is concluded that to promote social sustainability, a work organization has to be understood as a holon system in which development can only take place when also its members grow in their interior and exterior complexities. Complexity development is outlined as an emergent process; the importance of ‘un‐learning’ or dissipation is also explored. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In order to set the stage for this special issue, the prime concepts are defined: i.e. “chaos,” “complexity,” “learning” (individual and organizational), “learning organization,” and “chaordic enterprise”. Also, several chaos‐and‐complexity‐related definitions of learning and learning organizations are provided. Next, the guest editors' main thesis is presented, namely that the “chaordic enterprise” might be the goal state towards which a company – seen as a learning organization – might evolve, and that the framework of “chaordic systems thinking” could be used as a meta‐model to inform a learning organization which is capable of self‐organization and transformative change under hyper‐turbulent conditions. Finally, in order to illustrate the contours of a chaordic enterprise, the case of a dynamically reconfigurable, globally integrated, networked enterprise is presented.

The following represents an attempt to define and clarify the evolving patois of chaos using the language managers and practitioners find most familiar. The convention of italicizing and making bold words and phrases defined elsewhere in the glossary has been employed to facilitate the reader's grasp of the terms.

This Research Note seeks to add to the body of knowledge concerning social sustainability in work organizations, especially within the context of new challenges and threats in contemporary, post‐industrial working life. Moreover, the intention is to explore the added value of the complexity lens in promoting social sustainability at work. Work organizations are conceptualized as Chaordic systems to make accessible some aspects of organizations' structure and dynamics important for social sustainability. Our earlier paper (Kira and van Eijnatten, 2008) on the theme was critically assessed by Merrelyn Emery (2010). Therefore, we offer clarifications of some aspects in our earlier paper. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.