Beyond greening: new dialogue and new approaches for developing sustainability

The Sixth International Conference of the Greening of Industry Network, Developing Sustainability: New Dialogue, New Approaches, was held in Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 16–19 November 1997. This special edition of Business Strategy and the Environment attempts to capture the dialogue from the conference by presenting seven edited papers from the conference, a review of the conference's objectives and achievements from the perspective of the conference organizers, and this introductory essay. Each of the seven papers takes a different cut at theoretical, empirical and methodological questions around the focus of the conference. Together they represent the diversity and creativity of approach that is central to the conference's objective of establishing new dialogue on processes of greening and progress towards sustainable development. The organization of the conference and significant conference highlights, such as the incorporation of CERES into the organization of the conference, and the expansion of the Network into Asia, are reviewed by the conference organizers in this special edition (Fatkin and Fischer, 1998). This essay discusses new dialogues and new approaches to industrial transformation emerging from Santa Barbara. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Discourse as the means of community creation

The concept of “discourse communities” has wide use in education and linguistics, but has not yet been incorporated into studies of organizing. We would like to propagate the term in the context of organizing, as it extends the commonly accepted Foucault's insight that discourses tend to create their objects. One could add that discourses also create the identities of their participants. The concept is used in this paper as an analytical tool for three cases. We begin with the case of an attempt to create a new discourse community to replace an existing one. Following the logic of grounded theory, the analysis moves to a similar case—the creation of a discourse community around a product development project. The third case, although portraying a different process—an international acquisition—reveals a pattern similar to the second one. These cases demonstrate that discourses can both create and dissolve boundaries around a discourse community, and that although discourse is often used to create inclusion, it may also recreate the traditional patterns of exclusion.