Description
Book SynopsisA behind-the-scenes look at how corporate and financial actors enforce a business-friendly approach to global sustainability
In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies' social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.
And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address t
Trade Review
Deftly shows how expanding quantification practices around corporate sustainability are serving to perpetuate rather than seriously challenge the role of corporations in causing climate change. -- Marina Welker, Cornell University
Engagingly written and featuring an impressive breadth of research, Unsustainable offers a critical ethnography of corporate sustainability practices, challenging businesses (and the rest of us) to reckon with what we mean by `sustainability’ and how we think we can measure and manage it. -- Andrew Orta, Author of Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture.
Blows open the disguises of sustainability discourse and corporate sustainability metrics, taking readers on an important journey to demonstrate the ways that politics of sustainability matters. In a world of climate crises, the marketization of sustainability and the outsized influence of corporations in everyday life, ecosystems, and the planet itself, Unsustainable is a necessary book and a tool to help confront systems that perpetuate the problems. -- Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University
