Following Gandhi: Social Entrepreneurship as A Non-Violent Way of Communicating Sustainability Challenges

Abstract

Abstract:In the context of the Rio Earth Summit numerous international regimes, national policies and organizational guidelines have appeared that help translate the normative demands of sustainable development into political reality. The implementation of these instruments, however, often runs into difficulties or fails entirely. An example is the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), a progressive approach for the conservation of freshwater that is very unlikely to be implemented by 2015, the target year. We examine in this paper how a recent variation of Gandhian non-violent communication within social entrepreneurship suggests one way to deal with this challenge. Non-violent communication, rooted in Gandhian social action, has long been part of environmental politics. It has undergone a new variation as a mode of communication in the hands of social entrepreneurship initiatives that address urgent social and environmental issues with new, practical ideas. In the conceptual part of this paper, we outline our approach to sustainability, non-violent communication and social entrepreneurship. In a further part, we present data from a trans-disciplinary experiment to illustrate and critically discuss social entrepreneurship as a mode of sustainability communication. The experiment looked at, which is based on French social entrepreneur Roberto Epple's idea of a Big Jump, is a collaborative campaign that invites young people to take action for water conservation in the context of the WFD.

Sustainability, Transformational Leadership, and Social Entrepreneurship

“…This form of entrepreneurship is gaining importance as a line of scholarly inquiry [4,5]. Specifically, research on social entrepreneurship has been gaining attention due its potential to address societal problems, such as global warming, social inequality, environmental degradation, population explosion, poverty, illiteracy, and other sustainability challenges [6][7][8][9]. While extant research has explored what contextual factors influence commercial entrepreneurship [10], their influence on social entrepreneurship warrants further research [6,11].…”

Sustainability as Cognitive “Friction”: A Narrative Approach to Understand the Moral Dissonance of Sustainability and Harmonization Strategies

“…Simply put, moral corruption happens when people justify their immoral behavior by seeing it as weak or less strict and changing the morality of their behavior to coincide with their beliefs: moral corruption is invited in the form of denial mechanisms. These can be found in the literature, namely as distraction and procrastination, complacency, unreasonable doubt, selective attention, delusion, pandering, cynicism, and hypocrisy (Lever-Tracy, 2010;Norgaard, 2011;Dunlap, 2013;Ziegler et al, 2014Ziegler et al, , p. 1021. As well, this concept is related to the process of moral licensing, discussed mainly in consumer behavior research (Merritt et al, 2010;Blanken et al, 2015).…”

Contribution of Gandhian Thought to Corporate Responsibility

“…Using his beliefs in non-violent actions Gandhiji shaped a program of moral action called Satyagraha. "Satyagraha can be translated as the insistence on truth" (Ziegler et al, 2014(Ziegler et al, : 1024. He believed that even though absolute truth is unattainable, individuals should still strive for the truth, emphasising the exploration of moral truth in practical life.…”

“…Gandhiji encouraged the poor to produce and wear their own cloth rather than using British textiles. He indeed visualised this as empowerment through self-reliance and strengthening individuals through their inner struggle for truth (Ziegler et al, 2014).…”