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Towards Sustainability (UNIV 2200) - Reading Notes
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All of the reading notes for UNIV 2200 - Towards Sustainability, taught at the University of Guelph. All typed notes.
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UNIV 2200 - Reading NotesChapter 1 - New Questions for Business
● Sustainability = Change:
○ Change is required to make Earth more sustainable
○ This change must occur due to changing conditions to our natural resources on Earth
● Leadership for Sustainability:
○ Primary challenge involves bridging the society to organization
○ Societal changes must come before and drive organizational changes
○ Transforming leadership involves empowering all individuals to live a better life
● Organizations & Leaders as Agents for Change:
○ Social construction involves assigning value to things through communication
● Constructing our Social Reality:
○ Reality assumptions look at how we view the world
○ Value assumptions look at how we think the world works
○ Social reality comprises of a set of societal norms, practices, and shared values
encoded in law and custom
○ We constantly negotiate the meaning we assign to things
○ We often socially construct the meanings related to objects
● Believing is Seeing:
○ One cannot act without beliefs
○ By challenging one’s surface understanding will allow them to see why they make
certain assumptions
○ Believe -> see -> do
● Sustainability as a Contestable Concept:
○ Essentially contestable concepts are appraisive, internally complex, and are “open” in
character
■ Invoke a big idea, then serve as the arena for debate
● 5 Principles of Sustainable Development, Assessed Against 3 Alternative Methods:
○ 5 components of sustainable development: inclusiveness, connectivity, equity,
prudence, and security
○ Sustainability mindset: preserves nature and foregrounds human development
simultaneously
○ Technocentric mindset: human dominion over nature
○ Ecocentric mindset: humans are one elements of the natural world
● A Sustainability Mindset:
○ Business systems are primarily built on a technocentric paradigm
○ We want human development to occur but in a sustainable way
● Reconstructing Value that is Embedded, Sustainable, and Transformational:
○ 3 design principles needed to reconstruct values: embeddedness, sustainability
mindset, and transformation
○ Environment-society-economy are nested systems, embedded in one another
● The Challenge of Reflective Practice:
○ Reflection involves wondering, probing, analyzing, and synthesizing elements
■ Allows us to develop more collaborative, responsible, and ethical ways of
managing organizations
● The Process of Reconstructing Value:
○ 4R’s of reflective thinking: rethinking, relating, responding, and reinventing
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