Socially Sustainable Work Organizations: Conceptual Contributions and Worldviews

Abstract

This Research Note seeks to add to the body of knowledge concerning social sustainability in work organizations. The Research Note points out how further theoretical work on sustainability in work organizations seems to be needed, and it also emphasizes how promoting sustainability in working life connects to worldviews. Copyright

Health-Promoting Managerial Work: A Theoretical Framework for a Leadership Program that Supports Knowledge and Capability to Craft Sustainable Work Practices in Daily Practice and During Organizational Change

“…To craft health-promoting working conditions in normal circumstances, and also during organizational change, managers need knowledge and support in order to handle multiple interactions and combinations of multi-component risk and resource factors across different organizational levels [17,30,37,38]. From the perspective of sustainability, this includes work with health prevention and promotion, integrated with motivation, engagement, and organizational outputs [7,9,39]. Thus, leadership programs need to support the knowledge, awareness, and capability of managers that are related to the organization of sustainable psychosocial work conditions.…”

“…In this context, organizational perspectives mean the building of a capacity for sustainable conditions that correspond to the average needs of as many individuals as possible. The approach includes developments within the work environment that are integrated with efficiency and quality improvements, i.e., sustainable organizational developments [7,9,67]. Building a capacity for sustainable conditions means developing those resources that contribute to an organizational capacity to deal with demands within the organization [73,74].…”

Socially Sustainable Work Organisations: A Debate

“…She also emphasised that there are no remaining theoretical or practical challenges in producing socially and ecologically sustainable organisations; OST(E) provides everything that is needed for the development of sustainable work systems (Emery, : 408). We responded (Kira and van Eijnatten, ) pointing out that our original paper (Kira and van Eijnatten, ) had offered a new conceptual contribution (and should be judged as such). We also emphasised that, in our view and in the view of many other management and organisation studies scholars, there still are open research questions about and practical challenges in creating socially and ecologically sustainable work organisations.…”

Misunderstanding Metatheorizing

“…Starting in 2008, an open debate has taken place in this journal on the scientific validity of chaordic systems thinking (ChST) and its theoretical contributions to open system theory (OST). To briefly recount, Kira and van Eijnatten (, , , ) proposed ChST as a new approach to thinking about sustainable work. They proposed ChST as a model that builds on, but also goes beyond, OST and socio‐technical systems (STS) theory.…”