Sense of Place and Sustainable Development: The Case of a Tibetan Luxury Enterprise

Abstract

This study investigates how sense of place guides organizational sustainable development practices. Despite global phenomena, sustainable development challenges such as poverty and climate change are locally experienced and require local actions. Sense of place, which focuses on local phenomena, offers rich potential to understand organizations and sustainable development practices. This article presents an in-depth case study of Norlha Textiles, an enterprise implementing sustainable development practices in a nomadic village on the Tibetan Plateau. I apply an ethnographic approach to data collection through 3 months of fieldwork. I identified two forms of sense of place: emotional attachment and functional dependence, which can be disembodied from or embodied in the biophysical place. Then, I theorized organizational sustainable development practices in three pathways: maintaining, developing, and transforming place. This study advances organization studies on sense of place and sustainable development.