Page 195 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

178 A. Möller

important software systems in companies like enterprise resource planning systems
support routine jobs in corporations such as purchasing, production, warehousing,
book-keeping etc. It is an important job of management to identify optimal stan-
dards, which Taylor (1911) calls scientific management. Research is still required to
explore new standards in a globalized world, for instance product life cycle manage-
ment or supply chain management. (2) The problem is that delinguistified rules can
come into conflict with emerging challenges like sustainable development. By fol-
lowing the rules, organisations are unable to deal with new challenges. Winograd &
Flores call such a situation a breakdown. “By this we mean the interrupted moment
of our habitual, standard, comfortable ‘being in the world’. Breakdowns serve an
extremely important cognitive function, revealing to us the nature of our practices
and equipment, making them ‘present-to-hand’ to us (…) Most important, though, is
the fundamental role of breakdown in creating the space of what can be said, and the
role of language in creating our world” (1986: 77). In other words, it opens the door
for communicative action. (3) Unfortunately, this transition to a different form of
cooperative action results in higher complexity. To deal with this higher complexity,
complexity in other respects must be reduced. So, the ultimate purpose of communi-
cative action is to replace it by new roles for delinguistified coordination of action.
The focus of communicative action is not on isolated problems and solutions in
individual cases. It is targeted at abstraction, identification of new ways and new
mechanisms. With regard to corporate sustainability, the question is about new
standards (in the words of Taylor ‘new scientific management’), new forms of
corporate information systems etc. However, a direct switch from old to new standards
is not possible. New standards are based on new insights, new images and new
metaphors as they emerge in communication processes. Images like ‘carbon-free
company’ or ‘green company’ play a prominent role in such a process. They support
the introduction of new information instruments like life cycle assessment. New
instruments are tested with the aid of a software tool. Members of the organization
become gradually familiar with the new approaches. The results of experiments are
presented on PowerPoint slides. The slides are available in internet or intranet as pdf
files etc. Sankey diagrams or typical radar diagrams, showing the results of life cycle
assessment, become good arguments in such a process.
However, these images, software tools and visualizations do not facilitate the
replacement of sustainability communication in organisations by new systemic
mechanisms. What is needed is something like ‘sustainable business process re-
engineering’, providing images of business process automation. In fact, some of the
first decisions in a transition phase are fairly simple new rules such as the purchase
of environmentally friendly office equipment and paper, the activation of energy
saving functions of personal computers as a contribution to GreenIT, serving organic
food in the canteen etc. But such a set of new roles are not the optimal outcomes of
a consistent and integrated concept of sustainable routine in organisations.
Important approaches in creating new integrated ways of doing business include
business process re-engineering (Hammer and Champy 1993; Hlupic and Robinson
1998) and business process management (Ko 2009). A business process is defined
as an ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end,