Intrinsic Sustainable Development: Epistemes, Science, Business And Sustainability

Sustainable development sets the agenda for the 21st century. Human technological capability and needs mean that nature is and will be challenged and damaged in many ways. Whilst many social and technological innovations are being made to improve our survival prospects, they are likely to be insufficient to avoid continued social and ecological stress and the prospect of global tension if significant changes do not come about.The ideas in this book offer a new solution to sustainable development problems. They are concerned not with what we know but how we know, or rather how we order knowledge and create understanding in the human world.This book shows that some of the fundamental practices that shape modern society, especially in the business world, are the unwitting cause of unsustainable development. By extrapolating the epistemic analysis of Michel Foucault, a major social scientist, this book identifies a new episteme. It outlines a new way of ordering knowledge that better serves sustainable development.This pioneering book synthesizes the sciences of human and natural worlds and applies the findings to the creation of sustainable business models and equitable lifestyles for all.

This fascinating book takes us on a journey of thinking which can help us from doing accounting as `just business', to doing it as part of a newly `Just Business' where sustainable development will be simply accepted as something intrinsic. The book takes strength from Michel Foucault's idea of different human eras having systematically different ways of thinking and so forming different knowledge `epistemes'. The journey the authors then take is towards thinking an epistemic change, so far barely glimpsed, which would render such new ways of doing accounting and business `simply there'. Such journeys in thinking matter since, as Foucault observed elsewhere, thought should be understood as the very form of action: and given that, as he saw, power is only ever exercised as action on the actions of others, serious thinking action such as this can prove strategically central to the exercising of power's action in ways as yet unanticipated. Thus was it ever that a power, currently `inexorable', proves suddenly and irrevocably fragile and forgettable. --Keith Hoskin, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK

This is a book that takes onboard one of the most important issue of today's world; how we can do and think business differently in order to avoid the devastating ecological and human consequences that seem to follow in its wake. It is an ambitious task that the authors set out to undertake but I am obliged to say they have succeeded in their exploration. They argue that the possible solution lays much closer than we realise: within us and how we know. The argument is laid out with an unconventional style of storytelling where personal details about the authors' own situated knowledge journeys, and their interactions with a Chinese PhD student of one of them, are interwoven with philosophically based analysis of the order of things today. This interweaving makes the book both engaging and interesting as it invites the reader to `know differently'. It is more than just interesting; it is very inspiring to see how Michel Foucault's ideas and theorizing from The Order of Things (1977) have been brought to bear to help construct a history not just of the present but of a possible future. Being positive about the book does not mean that I am fully in agreement with the authors or their interpretations at all points, nor that I am not concerned about what they have excluded. But the book does what it sets out to do, and very successfully too. To me the important thing is that we should be taking on board this difficult topic and making space for discussions that can lead to the possibility, for each one of us who reads or talks about this book, of knowing and enacting sustainability differently. Today we have a major task before us, in seeking to include sustainability across all levels of business education. I think this book makes a major contribution to the much-needed task of trying to change what we teach and learn as we struggle with how to think and do business.
--Ann-Christine Frandsen, Senior Lecturer in Accounting, Essex Business School, Essex University, UK

This story of a journey of discovery has to be one of the most original books of recent times. Presented as an account of one person's interrogation of the assumptions that lead to unsustainable behaviour, this erudite, readable, and never less than fascinating book marks a turning point in business thinking. Dive in, look around, and enjoy! --Professor Andrew Dobson, Keele University, UK

In recent decades, the responsibilities of producers, sorting, incineration and hazardous waste management have been regulated. This has created a general consensus in favour of recycling ... The Stena Metall Group had a favourable position and to move into sustainable business in the 1980s using innovative solutions, the Group now converts waste from its customers into commodities of value. It is natural for us to support the ideas about intrinsic sustainability that are explored in this book. --John Lindkvist Vice CEO, Stena Mettal, Gothenburg

...this is one of the most unusual, surprising and, indeed, stimulating books that it has been my pleasure to read in recent years ... if you have any pretentions to becoming any kind of decent scholar in social and environmental accounting, I suggest to get hold of a copy of this and spend at least a little time in the company of an honest, brave and intellectually ambitious piece of work. --Journal of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting (CSEAR)