Page 189 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

172 A. Möller

been taken; they might take account of uncertainties; and they might help the
decision makers explore their own perceptions and values” (French and Turoff
2007: 39). All these functions are based on an idea of what people do in organisa-
tions: “People process information and make decisions (…); they carry out func-
tional roles, using collections of materials, according to stable rules (…); people
create and maintain a structure of authority (…); people negotiate and promote
competing interests (…); people enter into personal relationships (…)” (Winograd
1986: 204). Computer systems are used to represent all relevant states and processes
within an organization so that decision makers can process these data. The hope is
that the software system becomes a ‘second world’, at least with regard to the orga-
nization. Some concepts try to cover supply chains (information instruments for
supply chain management) or ecological product life cycles (life cycle assessment).
In the perspective of sustainability communication, computers provide information
about states and processes within a part of the world. Austin calls such informative
statements “constative utterances” (Austin 1971: 13).
Software systems can represent organisations in a new way because computers
as machines process symbols and do not – like other machines – process materials
and energy. Their purpose is the effective transformation of symbols. This is in line
with an understanding of language “as a system of symbols that are composed into
patterns that stand for things in the world” (Winograd and Flores 1986: 17).
Winograd and Flores call this the concept of correspondence. “(1) Sentences say
things about the world, and can be either true or false; (2) what a sentence says
about the world is a function of the words it contains and the structures into which
these are combined; (3) the content words of a sentence (such as its nouns, verbs and
adjectives) can be taken as denoting (in the world) objects, properties, relationships,
or sets of these” (Winograd and Flores 1986: 17). Computers ‘speak’ these lan-
guages and process sequences of symbols. Methods for means-end analyses (like
cost accounting), discrete event simulation etc. define the grammar of such a
language. Computer-based simulation tools use symbol-based immaterial represen-
tations to derive step-by-step future states of a system. Because humans understand
the language too, they can draw conclusions from the calculated states. For instance,
Jay Forrester used a special formal language (System Dynamics or Dynamo, the
programming language of System Dynamics) to construct the world models that
were the primary data source of the report ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972).
Such world models say something about the development of important states of the
whole world in the future.
With regard to corporate environmental protection and sustainable development,
so-called environmental management information systems are being developed.
Environmental management information systems are defined as “organizational-
technical systems for systematically obtaining, processing and making environmentally
relevant information available in companies. Above all these systems aid in determin-
ing the environmental damage caused by companies and designing support measures
to avoid and reduce it” (Page and Rautenstrauch 2001: 5). A basic concept is life cycle
assessment (LCA). ISO 14040 defines LCA as a “compilation and evaluation of the
inputs, outputs and potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout