Is digitalization a problem solver or a fire accelerator? Situating digital technologies in sustainability discourses

Abstract

Starting from the framework of the ‘futures of sustainability’ this article asks whether or not digital technologies are discursively framed in such a way that they can offer a solution to socio-ecological problems. The initial observation is that the mediation and interactions of digitalization and sustainability have recently been the subject of political debates. Using the mapping procedure of situational analysis, the discourses around digital technologies as they emerge in the ideal-typical paths of sustainability – modernization, transformation and control – are identified and presented. The results show that similar technologies provoke varying discourses in the three possibility spaces of future sustainability, which can also be attributed to different normative foundations.

Kapitalismus und Nachhaltigkeit

“…Erstens: Technologien prägen Ziele und Prozesse von Organisationen, und digitale Technologien befördern auch neuartige Möglichkeiten der Abstimmung und der Koordination (Dobusch/Schoeneborn 2015; Gümüşay/Smets 2020) sowie temporäre Formen des Organisierens wie Hackathons (Bertello et al 2021;Gegenhuber 2021). Daher ist es wichtig zu analysieren, wie insbesondere digita-les, soziales und nachhaltiges Unternehmertum in Zukunft gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen angehen wird (George et al 2020;Lenz 2021;Scheidgen et al 2021;Siebold et al 2022).…”

Conceptualizing sustainability in the context of ICT. A literature review analysis.

“…The broad semantic and conceptual scope of the term sustainability is subject to academic discussions: the term is described to be implicitly normative [1,[32][33][34][35] and polysemous [36,37]. More recently and importantly, the need to align the concepts of digitalization and ICT, digital sustainability, and digital transformations (B#5) emerged as a new important aspect [3,7,8,25,29,31], which further contributes to the terminological misalignment of sustainability in the context of ICT (B#6).…”

“…They are paired with social and economic transformations. For that matter, sustainability research has become a topic of interest as it promises practical solutions for these challenges [1][2][3]. It is postulated that fundamental sustainability transformations at the macro-, meso-and micro-level are required to address the manifold and complex challenges on the social, economic, and environmental levels involving multiple actors [4].…”

Digital sustainability: Ethics, epistemology, complexity and modelling

“…Except for proactive views of degrowth (Kerschner, et al, 2018), discussion about ICTs have been very limited and controversial as a meaningful agent in the quest for strong sustainability (Weiss and Cattaneo, 2017;Lenz, 2021). Research on the sustainability effects of a digital transformation of society and Industry 4.0 is still too limited to corroborate highly optimistic narratives on environmental benefits (Ghobakhloo, 2020;Cricelli and Strazzullo, 2021).…”