CEO Sustainability Discourses: Tackling Tensions in Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how CEOs as influential organisational and societal actors use language to construct meanings for corporate sustainability and the tensions within. Building on the integrative framework on corporate sustainability and strategic paradoxes and applying discourse analysis on the empirical data of CEO interviews, this paper sheds more light on the company elite’s talk and their constructed understanding of the tensions in corporate sustainability. In doing so, the paper tells a story of the strengthening role of sustainability in corporate strategies. The preliminary findings of the paper are thematised in three discourses, instrumental, normative and change discourses. The discourses are contradictory, both with each other as well as within. The discourses consist of various tensions and competing demands that CEOs are trying to deal with. Furthermore, the findings of the study depict how the CEOs balance between the strategic objectives of exploiting and exploring while gradually incorporating sustainability more prominently into their businesses.