Download or read book Metaphor Sustainability Transformation written by Ian Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an eclectic range of transdisciplinary insights into the role of metaphor, myth and fable in shaping our understanding of the world and how we interact with it and with each other. Drawing on innovative perspectives from widely different fields, this book explores how metaphor might facilitate and underpin transformative change towards environmental, ecological and societal sustainability. It illustrates the ways in which contemporary metaphors lock us into patterns of thinking, modes of behaviour, and styles of living that reproduce and accentuate our current socio-environmental problems. It sets itself the task of finding new metaphors and myths that might help move us towards sustainability as societal flourishing. By examining the use of metaphor in diverse fields such as energy use, the food system, health care, arts and the humanities, it invites the reader to reflect on the deep-seated influence of language in general, and metaphor in particular, in shaping how we understand and act upon the world. Re-imagining the use of language in framing both the problems we face and the solutions we devise, this novel contribution is a vital source of ideas for those aiming to change how we think and act in pursuit of more sustainable futures.

Download or read book Sustainability Transformations Across Societies written by Björn-Ola Linnér and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparison of how societal actors in different geographical, political and cultural contexts understand agents and drivers of sustainability transformations.

Download or read book Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability written by Brendon Larson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists turn to metaphors to formulate and explain scientific concepts, but an ill-considered metaphor can lead to social misunderstandings and counterproductive policies, Brendon Larson observes in this stimulating book. He explores how metaphors can entangle scientific facts with social values and warns that, particularly in the environmental realm, incautious metaphors can reinforce prevailing values that are inconsistent with desirable sustainability outcomes. "Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability" draws on four case studies--two from nineteenth-century evolutionary science, and two from contemporary biodiversity science--to reveal how metaphors may shape the possibility of sustainability. Arguing that scientists must assume greater responsibility for their metaphors, and that the rest of us must become more critically aware of them, the author urges more critical reflection on the social dimensions and implications of metaphors while offering practical suggestions for choosing among alternative scientific metaphors.

Download or read book Winning Sustainability Strategies written by Benoit Leleux and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite recent optimism and global initiatives, the implementation of corporate sustainability programs has been slow at best, with less than a third of global companies having developed a clear business case for their approach to sustainability. Presenting numerous award-winning cases and examples from companies such as Unilever, Patagonia, Tumi, DSM and Umicore alongside original ideas based upon 20 years of consulting experience, this book reveals how to design and implement a stronger sense of focus and move sustainability programs forward. This proven combination of purpose, direction and speed is dubbed “Vectoring”. Based upon practitioner cases and data analysis from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Vectoring offers a plain-spoken framework to identify the relative position of companies compared to their peers. The framework and its 4 archetypes deliver insights for practitioners to locate inhibitors and overcome them by providing practical suggestions for process improvements. This includes designing and executing new sustainability programs, embedding the SDGs within company strategy and assessing the impact of sustainability programs on competitiveness and valuation. Offering directions for CFOs to shift companies from integrated reporting to integrated thinking in order to accelerate their sustainability programs, Winning Sustainability Strategies shows how to achieve purpose with profit and how to do well by doing good.

Download or read book The Big Pivot written by Andrew S. Winston and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a fundamentally changed world. It’s time for your approach to strategy to change, too. The evidence is all around us. Extreme weather, driven by climate change, is shattering records all over the planet. Our natural resources are in greater demand than ever before as a billion more people enter the global middle class, wanting more of everything. Radical transparency is opening up company operations and supply chains to public scrutiny. This is not some futuristic scenario or model to debate, but today’s reality. We've passed an economic tipping point. A weakening of the foundations of our planetary infrastructure is costing businesses dearly and putting our society at risk. The mega challenges of climate change, scarcity, and radical transparency threaten our ability to run an expanding global economy and are profoundly changing “business as usual.” But they also offer unprecedented opportunities: multi-trillion-dollar markets are in play, and the winners of this new game will profit mightily. According to Andrew Winston, bestselling author (Green to Gold) and globally recognized business strategist, the way companies currently operate will not allow them to keep up with the current—and future—rate of change. They need to make the Big Pivot. In this indispensable new book, Winston provides ten crucial strategies for leaders and companies ready to move boldly forward and win in this new reality. With concrete advice and tactics, and new stories from companies like British Telecom, Diageo, Dow, Ford, Nike, Unilever, Walmart, and many others, The Big Pivot will help you, and all of us, create more resilient businesses and a more prosperous world. This book is the blueprint to get you started.

Download or read book Beyond the Triple Bottom Line written by Francisco Szekely and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pragmatic new business model for sustainability that outlines eight steps that range from exploring a mission to promoting innovation; with case studies. Many recent books make the case for businesses to become more sustainable, but few explain the specifics. In this book, Francisco Szekely and Zahir Dossa offer a pragmatic new business model for sustainability that extends beyond the traditional framework of the triple bottom line, describing eight steps that range from exploring a vision and establishing a strategy to implementing the strategy and promoting innovation. Szekely and Dossa argue that businesses and organizations need to move away from the business case for sustainability toward a sustainable business model. That is, businesses should go beyond the usual short-term focus on minimizing harm while maximizing profits. Instead, businesses on the path to sustainability should, from the start, focus on addressing a societal need and view profitability not as an end but as a means to support the sustainable organization. Szekely and Dossa explore key problems organizations face when pursuing a sustainability agenda. Each chapter presents one of the eight steps, describes a business dilemma for sustainability, provides a theoretically grounded strategic framework, offers case studies that illustrate the dilemma, and summarizes key findings; the case studies draw on the experiences of such companies as Tesla Motors, Patagonia, TOMs, and Panera. The book emphasizes leadership, arguing that leaders who question the status quo, inspire others, and take risks are essential for achieving sustainable business practices.

Download or read book Images of Organization written by Gareth Morgan and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2006-04-15 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its first publication over twenty years ago, Images of Organization has become a classic in the canon of management literature. The book is based on a very simple premise—that all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that stretch our imagination in a way that can create powerful insights, but at the risk of distortion. Gareth Morgan provides a rich and comprehensive resource for exploring the complexity of modern organizations internationally, translating leading-edge theory into leading-edge practice.

Download or read book Metaphor and Persuasion in Strategic Communication written by Federica Ferrari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking work adopts an alternative metaphor-based approach to challenge, unpack, and redefine our understanding of persuasion and strategic communication and the extents to which they shape political discourse. The book’s theoretical and methodological grounding in metaphor allows for an alternative perspective on strategic communication but also a robust discussion of both persuasion and other kinds of related discursive processes at work in political communication, including narrative, identification, and ideology. The volume integrates case studies from prominent political discourses, including those of George W. Bush, Jr., Tony Blair, and Barack Obama, to highlight the crucial role of persuasion management and sustainability in the public sphere and the ways in which it might inform political action and change in a positive way. Broadening our perception of the possibilities of persuasion and strategic communication, this dynamic volume is key reading for students and scholars in communication studies, political science, rhetoric, and cognitive linguistics.

Download or read book Interdisciplinary Approaches to Climate Change for Sustainable Growth written by Sara Valaguzza and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-19 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is an edited collection of contributions by a distinguished international panel of academics on the main scientific, juridical, and economic aspects involved in the mitigation and adaptation processes imposed by climate change. Explicitly interdisciplinary, the book transversally cuts through different disciplines offering an outline of a phenomenon that is too often left to specific and sectorial insights. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part introduces the main concepts of the book: climate change and sustainability, wellbeing, and mitigation and adaptation. The second part presents the scientific understanding of climate change and explores some of the more pressing issues driving policy development, such as the melting of the glaciers and the impact on coastal areas. The third part discusses significant experiences in the environmental policies both in the European Union and in the United States of America. The last section explains possible approaches to climate change, by exploring the legal and economic aspects of both adversarial and more lenient approaches towards a more sustainable world. It faces four main issues in the economic and juridical context: consumer behaviors, climate litigations, environmental litigations and the alternative forms of dispute resolution on environmental matters, with particular regard to environmental mediation. Offering a new vision of sustainable policies, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students of environmental policy, resource economics, environmental law, sustainable development, and public administration, as well as practitioners and policy makers working in related areas.

Download or read book Leading Sustainable Change written by Rebecca Henderson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The business case for acting sustainably is becoming increasingly compelling - reducing our global footprint to sustainable levels is the defining issue of our times and it is one that can only be addressed with the active participation of the private sector. However, persuading well-established organizations to act in new ways is never easy. This book is designed to support business leaders and organizational scholars who are grappling with this challenge by pulling together leading edge insights from some of the world's best researchers as to how organizational change in general - and sustainable change in particular - can be most effectively managed. The book begins by laying out the economic case for change, while subsequent chapters describe how leaders at firms such as Du Pont, IBM and Cemex have transformed their organizations, exploring issues such as the role of the senior team and the ways in which firms shift their identities, build innovative cultures and processes, and begin to change the world around them. Business leaders will find the book a source of both powerful examples and immediately actionable ideas, while scholars will be deeply intrigued by the insights that emerge from the cross-cutting exploration of one of the toughest challenges our society has ever faced.

Download or read book Social Sustainability Past and Future written by Sander van der Leeuw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel, integrated approach to understanding long-term human history, viewing it as the long-term evolution of human information-processing. This title is also available as Open Access.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Catalysts for a Sustainable Circular Economy written by Hanna Lehtimäki and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking handbook leads the way in accelerating the transition to a sustainable circular economy by introducing the concept of a catalyst as a positive and enhancing driving force for sustainability. Catalysts create and maintain favourable conditions for complex systemic sustainability transition changes, and a discussion and understanding of catalysts is required to move from a linear economy to a sustainable and circular economy. With contributions from leading experts from around the globe, this volume presents theoretical insights, contextualised case studies, and participatory methodologies, which identify different catalysts, including technology, innovation, business models, management and organisation, regulation, sustainability policy, product design, and culture. The authors then show how these catalysts accelerate sustainability transitions. As a unique value to the reader, the book brings together public policy and private business perspectives to address the circular economy as a systemic change. Its theoretical and practical perspectives are coupled with real-world case studies from Finland, Italy, China, India, Nigeria, and others to provide tangible insights on catalysing the circular economy across organisational, hierarchical, and disciplinary boundaries. With its broad interdisciplinary and geographically diverse scope, this handbook will be a valuable tool for researchers, academics, and policy-makers in the fields of circular economy, sustainability transitions, environmental studies, business, and the social sciences more broadly.

Download or read book Exploring Morgan s Metaphors written by Anders Örtenblad and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gareth Morgan’s monumental book, Images of Organization, revolutionized the field of organization theory. In honor of Morgan’s classic text, this edited volume, Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies (by Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, and Linda L. Putnam), illustrates how Morgan’s eight metaphors inform research, practice, and organizational intervention in a variety of contexts. Including contributions from well-known experts in their fields, specifically, Joep Cornelisen, Cliff Oswick, David Grant, and Gareth Morgan, this new text offers fresh perspectives and sets forth new metaphors for conceptualizing organizations in today’s workforce. Readers will gain insights and guidelines into the different ways that Morgan’s metaphors and metaphorical thinking can be used to better understand organizational life, as well as how to study and develop organizations.

Download or read book Metaphors for Change written by Penny Allen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we get from where we are to where we want to be? Metaphors for Change attempts to answer this question and provide a roadmap for sustainability by bringing together the thoughts of a unique collection of leading change agents from business, government and academia. Environmental questions have previously been dealt with metaphorically, by catastrophism or manicheism (zero growth; Malthusianism, Deep Ecology; "man is the enemy"; less is more). These metaphors have had limited impact because they have failed to connect with the mainstream of cultural, political, and business ideas. This book examines a number of new metaphors – and related partnerships, tools and action – which appear to have greater possibilities for the world in which we now live. The editors argue that Metaphors for Change can deliver to the public and to decision-makers new perceptions ("structured knowledge") that can help interpret the past and the present, and help us forge the future. The wider the gap between the "now" and the "necessary", the stronger the bridging perceptions have to be in order to break through barriers of fear and conservatism. Some of the concepts considered are: sustainable development; the polluter pays principle; the precautionary principle; eco-efficiency; eco-effectiveness; life-cycle assessment; design for the environment; eco-services; dematerialization; industrial symbiosis; industrial ecology; and zero emissions. There are of course other useful metaphors on the horizon, some of them included in this book. Including key contributions from the ground-breaking conferences ECO 97 and ECO 99, along with other specially commissioned and reprinted pieces, Metaphors for Change provides a treasure chest of new ideas, innovations and action. Accessible and forward-thinking, it will prove indispensable both as a student learning tool and as a panoramic overview of the sustainability metaphors key thinkers believe we should be putting into practice.

Download or read book Engineering Social Sciences and the Humanities written by Steen Hyldgaard Christensen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a critical examination of conversations between engineering, social sciences, and the humanities asking whether their conversations have come of age. These conversations are important because ultimately their outcome have real world consequences in engineering education and practice, and for the social and material world we inhabit. Taken together the 21 chapters provide scholarly-argued responses to the following questions. Why are these conversations important for engineering, for social sciences, and for the humanities? Are there key places in practice, in the curriculum, and in institutions where these conversations can develop best? What are the barriers to successful conversations? What proposals can be made for deepening these conversations for the future? How would we know that the conversations have come of age, and who gets to decide? The book appeals to scholarly audiences that come together through their work in engineering education and practice. The chapters of the book probes and access the meetings and conversations, and they explore new avenues for strengthening dialogues that transcend narrow disciplinary confines and divisions. “The volume offers a rich collection of descriptive resources and theoretical tools that will be useful for researchers of engineering practices, and for those aiming to reshape the engineering lifeworld through new policies. The book depicts the current state of the art of the most visible SSH contributions to shaping engineering practices, as well as a map of research gaps and policy problems that still need to be explored.” - Dr. Ir. Lavinia Marin, TU Delft, Electrical Engineering and Philosophy

Download or read book Climate and Society written by Robin Leichenko and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and important new book presents current and emerging thinking on the social dimensions of climate change. Using clear language and powerful examples, it introduces key concepts and frameworks for understanding the multifaceted connections between climate and society. Robin Leichenko and Karen O’Brien frame climate change as a social issue that calls for integrative approaches to research, policy, and action. They explore dominant and relevant discourses on the social drivers and impacts of climate change, highlighting the important roles that worldviews and beliefs play in shaping responses to climate challenges. Situating climate change within the context of a rapidly changing world, the book demonstrates how dynamic political, economic, and environmental contexts amplify risks yet also present opportunities for transformative responses. Aimed at undergraduate students and others concerned with a critical challenge of our time, this informative and engaging book empowers readers with a range of possibilities for equitable and sustainable transformations in a changing climate.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox written by Wendy K. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of paradox dates back to ancient philosophy, yet only recently have scholars started to explore this idea in organizational phenomena. Two decades ago, a handful of provocative theorists urged researchers to take seriously the study of paradox, and thereby deepen our understanding of plurality, tensions, and contradictions in organizational life. Studies of organizational paradox have grown exponentially over the past two decades, canvassing varied phenomena, methods, and levels of analysis. These studies have explored such tensions as today and tomorrow, global integration and local distinctions, collaboration and competition, self and others, mission and markets. Yet even with both the depth and breadth of interest in organizational paradoxes, key issues around definitions and application remain. This Handbook seeks to aid, engage, and fuel the expanding interest in organizational paradox. Contributions to this volume depict how paradox studies inform, and are informed, by other theoretical perspectives, while creating a resource that enables scholars to learn about and apply this lens across varied organizational phenomena. The increasing complexity, volatility, and ambiguity in our world continually surfaces paradoxical dynamics. Thus, this Handbook offers insights to scholars across organizational theory.