Page 193 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

176 A. Möller

However, cost accounting, cost cutting and labour efficiency are much more
important in everyday management in companies than for instance carbon foot-
prints. Concepts like life cycle assessment are welcome if they help to increase
economic efficiency. Companies want to identify win-win situations. Contrary to
expectations of life cycle management (Remmen et al. 2007), life cycle assessment
has more of a supportive function. The question is why.
This question is associated with the ever-present question of a company’s responses
to its problems. It is not a technical question (e.g. useless corporate information
systems or data gaps), it is rather a question of organizational culture and cultural
change. Schuhmacher (1997) distinguish two dimensions of cultural change: the
number of members and the number of domains changing. If cultural change affects
only a few members and the number of domains is low, he characterizes this type of
change as a ‘drift’. If the number of members and domains changing is high, it is a
‘transition’. “Transition is described here as change in many significant domains for a
majority of the members of the culture. The magnitude here is so great that the identity
of the culture is at least questioned, perhaps redefined” (Schuhmacher 1997: 115).
Concepts of life cycle assessment and eco-efficiency are not only information
instruments. They are also the ‘Trojan horses’ of new organizational images and
metaphors (‘metaphorical thinking’, Morgan 1986: 16): carbon-neutral companies as
industrial ecosystems, sustainable corporations and sustainable supply chains as
socio-economic metabolisms etc. Many members of companies are affected and the
changes are significant. So in fact the instruments aim at a transition of societies
and of corporations (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007). The next question is how
societies and corporations organize socio-economic transitions.
Habermas’s concept of society (1985a, b) distinguishes lifeworld and societal
subsystems like the economy. In his concept, economic efficiency (as described by
Taylor in 1911), cost cutting and value creation are generalized action orientations
in the subsystem economy. It is the result of a “social evolution as a second-order
process of differentiation: system and lifeworld are differentiated in the sense that
the complexity of the one and the rationality of the other grow” (Habermas 1985b: 153).
The process is triggered by communicative action. “Action oriented to mutual
understanding gains more and more independence from normative contexts. At the
same time, even greater demands are made upon this basic medium of everyday
language; it gets overloaded in the end and is replaced by delinguistified media”
(Habermas 1985b: 155). That is the paradox of communication. It is a co-evolution-
ary process and “modern societies attain a level of system differentiation at which
increasingly autonomous organisations are connected with one another via delin-
guistified media of communication: these systemic mechanisms – for example,
money – steer a social intercourse that has been largely disconnected from norms
and values, above all in those subsystems of purposive rational economic and
administrative action that, on Weber’s diagnosis, have become independent of their
moral-political foundations” (Habermas 1985b: 154).
This concept shows that communication can be understood as the last step of decision-
making and as a process of data exchange between decision makers. Communication
becomes a part of the systemic mechanisms in the societal subsystem economy.