ORGANISATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY: A CASE FOR FORMULATING A TAILOR-MADE DEFINITION

Derk Jan Kiewiet () and Janita F. J. Vos ()
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Derk Jan Kiewiet: Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen, P. O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
Janita F. J. Vos: Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen, P. O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands

Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (JEAPM), 2007, vol. 09, issue 01, 1-18

Abstract: Making sustainability operational within organisational practice requires dealing with three interrelated questions: A "what-question", an "attribute-question" and a "who-question". The complexity of these questions needs a tailor-made interpretation of sustainability. This paper provides a framework that can be used for obtaining such a tailor-made interpretation of sustainability. This framework is based on the notion that staff members somehow need to make sense of sustainability. By taking a cognitive mapping approach, a multidimensional space of sustainability can be deduced. The interpretation of the dimensions of this space can then provide a definition of sustainability. We illustrate the framework by obtaining an image of sustainability for a firm of consulting engineers.

Keywords: Cognitive map; cognitive mapping approach; multidimensional scaling; sustainability; triple bottom line (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1142/S1464333207002640

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