Sharing sustainability through sustainability control activities. A practice-based analysis

Abstract

How can sustainability control change organizational practices dominated by the business-as-usual paradigm? This paper offers a practice-based perspective on the question with the aim of approaching sustainability control tools as something organizations do rather than something they have. Using data from an ethnographic study of a gambling company, the study explores how sustainability actors put into effect sustainability control tools. It shows that actors enacted sustainability control tools in different ways, each of which carried out through distinct arrays of control activities: (a) by capturing an existing tool in another practice, (b) by adding a new hybrid tool to another practice, or (c) by capturing a tool that was already shared between several practices. Through these control activities, they attempted to interlock the sustainability practice with other practices and produced distinct types of links – respectively, (a) reassembling, (b) expanding and (c) rippling. These findings contribute to unpacking sustainability control by highlighting that sustainability tools can only become control tools when they are supported by arrays of activities tying practices together, and that these interrelations can happen in different ways. These ways of enacting control enable sustainability controlling to various extents and they affect practices differently. The paper also contributes to practice theory by specifying how particular configurations of practices emerge and alter the practices involved.