ISSST 2015 Team Science Workshop: Sustainable Organizing and CCO

Introductory review of my research on sustainable organizing and the communication constitutes organization (CCO) approach for the Team Science Workshop, prior to the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST) 2015 gathering.

Transcript

1. Sustainable Organizing: Communication and Collaboration Processes Rahul Mitra, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Email: rahul.mitra@wayne.edu
2. Agenda 1. Defining sustainability 2. Communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) 3. Research exemplars of the communicative perspective to sustainable organizing o Personal o Institutional o Systemic
3. What is Sustainability? “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Council for Economic Development, 1987) Personal Institutional Systemic
4. Communication as Constitutive of Organization • Communication as a “practical” discipline—well-suited to examining how policy and practice (in)form each other (Craig, 1999, 2006; Craig & Tracy, 1995) • Communication “constitutes” the organization of social reality—via social networks, interpersonal relationships, interactional sequences, codified texts, and discursive formations (CCO) (Cooren et al., 2006; Kuhn, 2008; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009; Schoeneborn, 2011; Taylor & van Avery, 2000)
5. Organizing Sustainably… A Communicative Perspective • Self/Society Negotiations Personal • Local practices in different contexts Institutional • Policy drafting and action at macro level Systemic
6. Personal: Meaningful Work How do sustainability practitioners find their work meaningful? • 45 in-depth interviews • Examining everyday interactions at work, and narratives crafted collaboratively retrospectively • Dynamic perspective, over career, institutional, and policy changes
7. Institutional: Transformational Leadership How does 350.org enact transformational leadership among ENGOs & protesters? • News reports, press releases, website and weblog copy, and popular press publications around Keystone XL pipeline protests • Focus on collaborative processes of naming identities, processes, and concepts
8. Systemic: Arctic Mgmt. Policy How do different organizations enact environmental resource management policy? • Inter-organizational sense-making about policy—that is paradoxical, vague, or even absent • Local-level paradoxes generate new institutional and systemic practices, which in turn translates to (ad hoc?) systemic policy
9. In closing: CCO, Sustainable Organizing, & Team Science • CCO emphasizes the collaborative nature of sustainable organizing— identifying both benefits and potential drawbacks • Helps connect the personal, institutional, and systemic levels of sustainable organizing—or any large-scale tangled problem (“wicked problem”) that needs to be addressed