Organizing for social sustainability: governance through bureaucratization in meta-organizations

Abstract

The difficulties nation states face when attempting to use traditional legal means to cope with transnational phenomena such as environmental degradation, international labor conditions, and global trade have created an opportunity for the emergence of new types of regulations. These rules are often issued by organizations that produce voluntary measures such as standards and action plans to influence the behavior of individuals and institutions. These are in many cases meta-organizations that have other organizations rather than individuals as members. They are important links in the process of creating and diffusing dominant definitions in the "ideoscape" of influential policy concepts such as sustainable development. This article explores how two meta-organizations, Fairtrade International (FLO) and Organic Forum, shape the concepts of fair trade and organic food by providing ideas and content to the ideoscape of sustainable development. We argue that this process takes place by governance through bureaucratization in which fair trade and organic food become formalized, precisely defined, and made visible. This in turn determines how-or even if-the social dimension of sustainability can be made into policy. Furthermore, we find explanations in these processes as to why the social dimension of sustainability tends to be the most underdeveloped. We conclude that bureaucratization is also a form of politics, although not one that is as easily recognizable as an open power struggle.

A missing pillar? Challenges in theorizing and practicing social sustainability: introduction to the special issue

“…Second, articles in this special issue connect the notion of social sustainability to a variety of other social science perspectives, concepts, and theories including theories of scale (Klintman, 2012), notions of temporality (Devlin & Tubino, 2012;Hiedanpää et al 2012;Psarikidou & Szerszynski, 2012), moral economy and moral taskscape (Psarikidou & Szerszynski, 2012), human-nonhuman animal relations (Hiedanpää et al 2012), concepts of work related to green social enterprises (Osti, 2012), ecological modernization and transition theory (Jensen et al 2012), governance through bureaucratization (Casula Vifell & Thedvall, 2012), as well as social movement theory (Devlin & Tubino, 2012).…”

“…Several novel sustainability projects are embedded within local and/or global capitalist structures, and this special issue highlights cases such as sustainable buildings (Jensen et al 2012), certification of sustainable tourism (Klintman, 2012), fair trade, and organic food (Casula Vifell & Thedvall, 2012). These and other sustainability initiatives-framed as corporate social responsibility or the triple bottom lineare often seen as concrete attempts to integrate all three dimensions of sustainability.…”

“…This has occurred within such diverse areas as urban and regional planning (Schlossberg & Zimmerman, 2003;Cuthill, 2009;Davidson, 2009;Dempsey et al 2011), fair trade certification (e.g., Taylor, 2004), forest certification (e.g., Klooster, 2010;Boström, 2011), organic agriculture (e.g., Shreck et al 2006), conventional agriculture (Nordström Källström & Ljung, 2005;Mancini et al 2008), as well as corporate social and environmental management, reporting, and responsibility (e.g., Sharma & Ruud, 2003;Bebbington & Dillard, 2009;Brown et al 2009). This special issue contributes to this trajectory first presenting a typology for organizing research on social sustainability (Murphy, 2012) and then featuring studies on alternative agrofood networks and practices (Psarikidou & Szerszynski, 2012), conflicts surrounding human-animal relations (Hiedanpää et al 2012), bureaucratization of fair trade and organic food policy making (Casula Vifell & Thedvall, 2012), sustainable tourism (Klintman, 2012), access to mobility (Cucca & Tacchi, 2012), green social cooperatives (Osti, 2012), sustainable buildings (Jensen, et al 2012), and participatory environmental monitoring of a Brazilian mining company (Devlin & Tubino, 2012).. These examples demonstrate some progress toward the realization of an integrative vision of sustainability in various sectors, but they also confirm many challenges.…”

How Frugal Innovation Promotes Social Sustainability

“…The social pillar has not received as much attention as the other two dimensions-ecological and economic [1,[82][83][84][85][86][87]. Therefore, it is important to explore the role of organizations that organize the sustainability projects in shaping the balance between the pillars [88,89]. Nevertheless, social sustainability is considered to be the fundamental component of sustainable development [90].…”

“…It is a dynamic concept with a high possibility of change over time. It is unclear what social sustainability really means in practice and what its dynamics and breaks are [11,88,[92][93][94][95].…”