Presented to the Organizational Communication Division at the International Communication Association 2015, at San Juan, PR.
Although “competitiveness” is a pervasive frame in global business discourse, with practitioners frequently urging “sustainable” value addition, the subjective meanings of these concepts in different contexts—especially emerging markets—remain underexplored. This paper adopts a communicative approach to the meaning-making surrounding competitiveness. It draws on in-depth interviews with 12 environmental sustainability practitioners from emerging markets, to trace: 1) how they discursively positioned their work as adding competitive value, and 2) the challenges perceived in realizing this competitive advantage. Competitiveness was positioned via four themes: emphasis on “mainstreaming” sustainability with regular operations, detailed reporting, adoption of established standards to legitimize the company, and operating in an environment with encouraging government policy. Ironically, participants’ understanding of the challenges also hinged on two of these themes—swimming upstream against short-term business interests to “mainstream” sustainability, and the hampering of over-zealous or nonexistent state policy. Implications for future research on competitiveness are also discussed.