Page 190 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

15 Computer Support for Cooperative Sustainability Communication 173

its life cycle” (ISO 14040; Guinée 2002: 5). LCA does not comprise all flows of a
material and energy flow system, e.g. a company or supply chain. The relevant flows
must be related to a product or service (Consoli et al. 1993; Berlin and Uhlin 2004;
Frankl and Rubik 2000). This specifies the intended application context of life
cycle assessment. It is designed as a decision support instrument. “A decision-
maker uses LCA for generating information on the environmental implications of
products. For this purpose a model is set up covering the material and energy flows
attributed to a product and their evaluation in view of their environmental impact”
(Werner 2005: 5). This perspective results in key architectural decisions of
computer-based support systems. EMIS can be characterized as special decision
support systems.
Communication is defined as the last step of decision-making, the communica-
tion of decisions and results. When external stakeholders of an organization are
involved, this kind of communication is called reporting. For example, corporate
sustainability management provides “stakeholders with information about sustain-
ability-relevant issues and how the company is dealing with them… An essential
goal in informing key stakeholder groups about non-financial issues is to secure the
legitimation of corporate activities and the supply of important resources” (Herzig
and Schaltegger 2006: 301). Today, reporting is computer-based. This allows target-
group tailored reports (Marx Gómez and Isenmann 2004) and interactive reporting
(Isenmann and Kim 2006). After all, the role of communication and language is
based on the equivalency of management and decision-making, with manager and
decision maker being synonymous. Communication is required because other deci-
sion makers (stakeholders) need information about the decisions as data input for
their own decisions. They need statements about the states and processes relevant
for their decisions – and environmental performance is treated more and more as
relevant to this decision-making.

Basics of Computer-Supported Communication

Is data exchange between decision makers the only modus of communication in
organisations? And is decision-making the only link between communication and
action? If this was true all conversation would be characterized as statements about
past, current and future situations. Austin, however, emphasized that not all utter-
ances are statements (Austin 1962). He analyzed the relationship between different
types of utterances and action. One important distinction is between constative
utterances and performance utterances (or performatives). “The constative utter-
ance, under the name, so dear to philosophers, of statement, has the property of
being true or false. The performance utterance, by contrast, can never be either:
it has its own special job, it is used to perform an action” (Austin 1971: 13).
Performatives constitute acts like promising, advising or naming. This theory is
called speech act theory. It starts “with the assumption that the minimal unit
of human communication is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the