Sustainability Talk, Business Walk: A Practice-Based Ethnography of Responsible Managing in the Context of Servitization
Abstract
This thesis examines how management practices in for-profit organizations respond to the growing imperative of sustainability. Adopting a posthumanist practice-based perspective, it addresses the question: what management practices does a strategy framed as sustainable produce? Based on a three-year ethnography conducted within a Belgian automotive organization, the research uses an abductive approach to analyse how practices evolve during strategic transformation and how sustainability is enacted. It critically examines the link between sustainable offerings and the emergence of responsible management.
The findings show how sustainability transformation is shaped by practices that sustain financialization. The analysis identifies processes of delegitimation that operate through everyday organizational activities and systematically constrain the enactment of responsible management. These processes reframe sustainability initiatives as strategic and financial opportunities, thereby diluting their transformative potential and critical weight. Overall, the thesis contributes to understanding the mechanisms through which financialization is reproduced in organizations and helps explain resistance to a broader paradigm shift toward strong sustainability.
