Abstract
Purpose
Political frameworks, regulations and stakeholder expectations guide and evaluate corporations in taking responsibility to mitigate and/or solve climate change related problems. Consequently, organizations increasingly communicate their activities related to ‘sustainable development’ and ‘transformation’ to their stakeholders – often without a deeper communicative manifestation within organizations. With our concept of ‘conversational spaces’ allowing conversational contestation of sustainability as ‘moral compass’, we argue that internal communication plays a key role in problematizing and thus ‘re-politicizing’ sustainability which is needed to cultivate sustainability as a guiding principle of action in organizations and not ‘just’ in their stakeholder-relations.
Approach
In this conceptual paper we, firstly, critically analyze the deficits in contemporary scholarly work dealing with communication of, about and for sustainability. We argue that sustainability is still communicated – and theorized accordingly – with narrow business interests and directed towards external stakeholders, neglecting the transformative power of internal communication which has led to sustainability being used as a master narrative and ‘ideological movement’, detached from internal discourses in organizations about the concrete consequences of the climate crisis or the ‘good life’. Therefore, we secondly discuss the role and potential of spaces for contestational communication within organizations about and, thus, for sustainability.
Originality
The paper introduces a concept to identify and set up conversational spaces where sustainability can be negotiated and debated internally. It also explores the key characteristics of these spaces that lead to contestational, in other words, agonistic and thus ‘political’ sustainability communication in organizations.
1. Introduction
In the current permacrisis with the world realizing that we’re at the brink of a climate collapse – while differing regarding the level of climate change concern – the discourse on effective timely responses remains political. Responsibility to adapt to and mitigate climate change related problems is often communicatively allocated to governments and corporate organizations. Following, political frameworks on more or less normative levels (from the global SDG1 framework to the EU-specific “omnibus”2;) are developed to guide and support above all corporations in taking responsibility as they are part of the evolution and, in consequence, the solution of the crisis and narratives of ‘sustainable growth’ or ‘corporate sustainability’ (Wright & Nyberg, 2017). Related governance concepts are used as evaluation criteria of corporate behavior (ESG3) and corporate sustainability reporting (GRI4).
Meeting stakeholder expectations related to socio-ecological transformation and, thus, taking responsibility for making a ‘sustainable turn’ towards a ‘just’ future is challenging; tensions between expectations, the corporate mission and the large number of regulations and frameworks – at least in Europe – make corporate behavior quite uncertain and ambiguous. One way to create stability is to communicate the responsibility that is seen and attributed and engage in activities related to what is framed as ‘being sustainable’ to an organization’s stakeholders. This is analyzed and theorized in the growing field of sustainability communication as communication of sustainability mostly related to and focused on external relation building (Canel, 2023, Weder and Erikson, 2023, Golob et al., 2023). With an increase in reporting, website disclosures and ‘sustainability claiming’ in (media) discourses as part of communication of sustainability, corporate sustainability communication has professionalized and is more and more handed over to external consulting and rating agencies (Diwan & Amarayil Sreeraman, 2024), which has also contributed to the evolution of the ‘sustainability story’ and a normalization of sustainability in public discourses (Weder, 2023a, Weder, 2023b). Complementary to the normalization – and, thus, manifestation and institutionalization – of sustainability at the intersections between organizations and their environment, their ‘public relations’, Weder (2023a) conceptualizes the cultivation of sustainability as complement to ‘external’ normalization, as bottom-up process within organizations, more precisely: as a “dialectic process of questioning and stabilization in transformation processes” (p. 239). Cultivation of sustainability means to cultivate new norms and related patterns and establish sustainability as an undisputable guiding principle of action and potential universal value within certain structures, quasi bottom-up (ibid.).
In the emerging field of sustainability communication research, scholars differentiate the communication of sustainability from communication about and, for sustainability (Newig et al., 2013; Golob et al., 2023, Weder and Erikson, 2023), where the latter dimensions would include the cultivation of sustainability through more dialogical, participatory and even contestational forms of communication. However, in this current corpus of sustainability communication research, we identify two major deficits: The first deficit concerns the focus on communication of communication to an external environment, with the majority of empirical studies describing and exploring corporate reporting or communicative representation of the sustainability narrative as narrative of economic progress in owned communication channels (Golob et al., 2023). Consequently, strategic sustainability communication and sustainability PR are mostly conceptualized from a managerial perspective, as communication that centers messaging and signaling to protect reputation and legitimize the organization and its actions in the long run; what is missing is a critical understanding of communication as irritation, as questioning existing paradigms and patterns of corporate action. The dominance of communication of sustainability in PR practice and the focus on reporting go hand in hand and perpetuate the development that grand challenges are ‘just’ translated to align with more dominant business discourses and practices, keeping sustainability hijacked by an optimistic market discourse and diluting climate change concerns (Banerjee et al., 2021, Wright & Nyberg, 2017).
The second deficit that we see is also related to the dimensions of communication about and for sustainability and a lack of critical communication concepts. There is a history in (critical) PR theory seeking to better understand the transformative potential of discourses and how this happens as communicative interplay between organizations and public (mediated) discourses, initiated by or related to a social problem or crisis (see for example Coombs and Holladay, 2013, Motion and Leitch, 2009). Recently, there are attempts made by PR scholars pointing to the transformational (e.g., Ciszek, 2017) and emancipatory potential and character of PR (e.g., L’Étang, 2016), and who claim that Public Relations explicitly needs to be ‘re-politicized’, to be about sparking conversations by irritation to support transformation and impact areas of change like culture, work, learning, or consumption (Rademacher et al., 2025). However, this work also focuses on ‘public relations’ and, thus, the moderation and management of meaning negotiations in external relationships. What isn’t so much of a conceptual or practical debate is apparently the key role of internal communication in moderating, negotiating and thus co-constructing and cultivating sustainability as guiding principle of action from the bottom line, from within an organization. Focusing on the constitutive role of language and communication in an organizational context (Andersson, 2020, Schoeneborn et al., 2022), communication from individual and collective actors within an organization has the potential to reduce the ambiguity of a crisis narrative, facilitate internal sensemaking, and foster creative outputs and therefore transformation from within an organization (Heide & Simonsson, 2021).
Consequently, in our paper, we stress that internal communication plays a key role in “cultivating sustainability” as a guiding principle of action (Weder, 2023). Therefore, not only an increase in communication about sustainability is needed, but also the character of internal sustainability communication needs further thinking, elaboration? Here we propose conversational contestation, a term that has previously been mentioned in critical PR theory: While contestation is there described as problematization, as questioning and cracking (ibid.), we expand this idea of problematization with the idea of (re-)politicization, which is described as process by which certain phenomena, issues or narratives enter the sphere of ‘the political’, which is a ‘space of controversy and conflict’ (Bobba & Hubé, 2021). In contrary to depoliticization where issues are removed from one discourse and placed outside a direct control or influence (‘arena shifting’; Flinders & Buller, 2006), politicization changes the nature and character of a discourse or conversation which was once considered neutral or consensus-driven and puts the organizational or institutional structures of the discourse or conversation into question (Bobba & Hubé, 2021).
While politicization is now often reframed as and discussed with a specific focus on polarization (Bolsen and Shapiro, 2018, Brüggemann and Meyer, 2023, Zhou, 2016), politicization and polarization are not (yet) discussed extensively related to organizations and internal sustainability communication in particular (Schoeneborn et al., 2024). This is exactly where our argument starts: we assume that sustainability can only be cultivated as principle of action if internal communicators get the chance – the time and space – to explicate, contest, debate and negotiate their expectations and their interpretations of sustainability and related value frameworks and behaviors in internal conversations – which makes this internal discourse political. Furthermore, we argue that these agonistic conversations and discourses (Davidson, 2016, Mouffe, 2013, Weder, 2021), firstly, need to happen in specific places that have certain contextual conditions, so called conversational spaces.
The presented conceptual work should stimulate future empirical research and further theorizing of the political character of sustainability communication in organizations, as well as the important question of single actors and their involvement in the conversational spaces.
2. Deficits in sustainability communication research
As briefly mentioned in the introduction, we identified two deficits in research that is dealing with communication of, about and for sustainability: firstly, the prevailing dominance of a managerial approach to corporate sustainability communication, followed by very pragmatic applications of a transmission model of communication to corporates doing good and talking about it (Golob et al., 2023; Weder, 2023). Secondly, sustainability communication as an emerging research field does not include aspects of internal communication in conceptual considerations and empirical work – at least not yet. While there are first attempts to tackle sustainability from an organizational communication perspective (Gümüsay et al., 2022, Schoeneborn et al., 2022) and empirical work on CSR effects on employees (Yassin & Beckmann, 2024), a deeper theorization of sustainability as principle of action that is cultivated within organizations is missing. Both deficits will be further elaborated in the following showing the gaps which the new concept of conversational spaces, presented in the following chapter, will fill.
2.1. Dominant functionalist approach in external sustainability communication
PR research exploring and explaining sustainability communication so far follows mostly a functional and therefore instrumental and very pragmatic understanding of strategic communication, based on the definition that strategic communication is the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission (Hallahan, 2007, p. 3), aiming for support of an organizational purpose and the social license to operate (Hurst & Johnston, 2021). Holzhausen & Zerfass (2015) argue that „the ultimate aim of strategic communication is to maintain a healthy reputation for the communication entity in the public sphere“, which has become „participative rather than representative“ (pp. 5–6). This perspective works for PR concepts focusing predominantly on external relationships between an organization and its publics, either conceptualized as symmetric, two-way communication being the ideal (Grunig, 2013), or approached as being best of dialogical (see Kent, 2017, Sommerfeldt and Yang, 2018, Taylor et al., 2019); even if these dialogic concepts mark a turn away from instrumental and managerial approaches, the functionalist approach still “claims and laws that [communication] can help organizations to become more efficient and effective in their functions” (Heide & Simonsson, 2015, p. 226). In the context of a crisis scenario, PR is conceptualized accordingly as a function supporting stability. It is a transmission-oriented view of communication striving for control and predictability, protecting reputation and increasing organizational legitimacy (Heide & Simonsson, 2015).
In the emerging research field of sustainability communication, many publications follow this approach and focus on rather linear and information-based communication of sustainability. Consequently, non-financial reporting, website or social media communication are at the center of conceptual and empirical work (Golob et al., 2023, Weder et al., 2021). This diagnosis goes hand in hand with the thinking in neighboring subdiscipline of CSR communication, where Ellerup Nielsen and Thomsen (2018) conclude that publications in this area are “instrumentally rather than ethically driven – in that the most prominent role attributed by scholars to CSR communication is its assumed capacity to increase businesses’ market opportunities” (p. 502). They found only very few studies that discuss CSR communication from a social constructivist perspective on communication as creating mutual understandings and deliberative networks. The pragmatic and functional paradigm of CSR and sustainability communication in an organizational context is perpetuated due to the increased regulation and therefore institutionalization of sustainability management in corporates (Schaltegger et al., 2024) – and it fits quite nicely to how the sustainability story has been told in public discourses over the years. A growing catalog of frameworks, policies and regulations on a more or less concrete level (from SDGs to ESG criteria) are welcomed as goals for any strategic communication activity that follows, and the goals are usually not further debated or questioned, neither in the public sphere nor in organizational contexts. And why should they be debated and questioned anyway? Sustainability from a communication perspective is mostly a story of harmony and balance; it is the counter story to the ‘negative’ story of the climate crisis, of biodiversity loss, damage, and the erosion of natural systems, a global chaos and human superiority over nature (Hendersson & Wamsler, 2020). Sustainability is the good story of a balanced human-nature relationship, collective co-creation and ecological balance (e.g., Edwards, 2015). Complemented by a positive connotation of transformation and (sustainable development) in general, the “sustainability story” is something that hardly anyone would disagree with, there is not quite an opposition to it (Weder, 2024).
However, in a situation where sustainability communication is still following a progress narrative and is overly optimistic and “smooth” (Pyla, 2012), it feels necessary to (re)deepen a democratic culture in organizations and beyond through ensuring dissensus and contest are not removed through PR aiming for dialogical or neutral deliberation and (rational) consensus (Davidson, 2016). We might need a different perspective on communication processes and structures in the context of a socio-ecological transformation process, in sustainability communication theory captured as communication about and for sustainability and grounded in a less pragmatic and functionalist but much more social constructivist or even constitutive approach to communication. In the growing field of sustainability communication, communication about and for sustainability is communication that accepts multi-vocacy, oppositional arguments and dissent (Weder & Erikson, 2023) and therefore marks a very fruitful ground for further theorization of ‘political sustainability communication’. Communication about and for sustainability in particular includes participatory and co-creational processes of engagement and negotiation of meaning, significance and relevance (ibid.; see also Golob et al., 2023). And it demands to rethink the character of communication itself. Weder (2024) differentiates normalization and cultivation of sustainability through communication aligned with a more information and managerial understanding of communication on the one hand, and a more critical, (per)formative understanding on the other hand; aligned with related work in discourse studies (Krzyżanowski, 2020), the author defines normalization as a process where norms are (strategically) constructed in discourses and become, or are strategically assumed to become, part of mainstream and common thinking. In contrary, cultivation of sustainability is described as process of cultural anchoring of the principle of sustainability through and in social communication processes. Based on Reisch (2006), people within a certain context are enabled to absorb and internalize sense-based experience and create an infrastructure that helps towards ‘self-coercion’; therefore, communicative cultivation means reproducing sustainability (performativity, reproduction or modification, see also Weder, 2021). Because, if many actors act similarly under certain cultural conditions, their actions can become a new (or at least changed) practice and culture (and new norms) is (are) born of practices. A culture of sustainability can develop around sustainability as new norm, in other words: sustainability becomes a ‘prism’ through which we view the world (Reisch, 2006, Weder, 2023a). An internal communication perspective seems to be needed, however, this is exactly where we see a second deficit in PR and sustainability communication theory and empirical research.
2.2. Lack of internal sustainability communication research
As briefly mentioned in the introduction, conceptual work and empirical studies on internal sustainability communication, its conditions and character are rather limited. Some work is done on the dependencies between internal stakeholders’ perceptions and (communicative) actions and official internal sustainability communication by the CEO, managers, and entities (Duthler & Dhanesh, 2018); there is also an increase in work dealing with CSR management and how it impacts employers (e.g., Onkila and Sarna, 2022, Yassin and Beckmann, 2024). Guided by this perspective, other scholars elaborate the impact of internal communication by examining stakeholders’ perceptions of CSR reports and potential outcomes. It was found that employees’ perceptions of organizational CSR communication strengthen job engagement, increase megaphoning and commitment, and foster their pro-environmental behavior (Bauman and Skitka, 2012, Dong et al., 2023, Lee et al., 2024).
In parallel to PR and internal communication, there is an increased interest in management and strategic communication literature in the ways that are chosen to communicate sustainability and predominantly CSR related activities and behavior to the inside (Schaefer et al., 2021, Yusri and Amran, 2012) and on the roles that are needed to do this efficiently.
Overall, research dealing with sustainability from an organizational perspective, very similar to sustainability communication research, seems to be predominantly discussed from a managerial perspective and mostly described as informing and shaping employees’ acceptance of CSR activities (internal sustainability related engagement of an organization) and a general sustainability strategy. Again, here communication is reduced to rather linear information processes (communication of sustainability) – even internally. Just recently, single authors started to point out that sustainability and related normative claims need to be reflected by social processes and should not be narrowly conceptualized as an outcome of information disclosure at the corporate level (Sendlhofer & Tolstoy, 2022). They call for bottom-up approaches and show that room for employees to exercise their own judgments, possibly leads to more radical and genuine responsibly and sustainable behavior. Kataria et al. (2013) highlight more than 10 years ago that “employees could be a greater source of generating new ideas for sustainability implementation” (p. 49), which is picked up more recently in internal communication literature emphasizing that several voices contribute to what, how, and how much is debated internally and externally (e.g., Heide et al., 2020, Madsen and Verhoeven, 2019).
For this paper, we do not focus on specific internal communicator roles (e.g., with a focus on concepts such as employee voice, megaphoning, activism, see Kang, 2021, Krishna, 2021, Kim and Rhee, 2011) or on the need to foster employee engagement and involvement of single or collective voices regarding sustainability (see e.g., Dong et al., 2023, Lee et al., 2024); instead, we’re much more interested in how ‘exercising own judgments’, ‘more radical and genuine responsibly and sustainable behavior’ and more ‘political’ in the sense of ‘contestational’ sustainability communication can look like and, thus, what the conditions are to re-politicize sustainability as guiding principle of action through communication from the bottom line of organizations. Therefore, the guiding question for this paper is: What is the character of conversational spaces allowing conversational contestation aiming to initiate a re-politicization of sustainability in an organizational context?
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