Paper short abstract:

A vision for most companies is to incorporate “sustainability” into operational activities. But a company needs to translate the general and sometimes conflicting UN's global goals into their everyday practices. What stories are told about these translations, dilemmas, choices and best practices?

Paper long abstract:

A vision for most companies is to incorporate “sustainability” into everyday operational activities. But a company needs to translate the general, rather abstract, and sometimes conflicting UN's global goals for economic, ecological, social and cultural sustainability into their everyday practices. What stories are told about these translations, dilemmas, choices and best practices? This paper discusses how five interviewees, who are owners/CEOs of small, peripherally located companies in sparsely populated areas in Sweden, narrate sustainability practices in their companies. Some of these companies are world leading in their industry/niche. The empirical data consists of semi-structured interviews that are analysed from a narrative perspective. In the interviews, sustainability in these small, and yet internationally active, companies is narrated as an implicit part of the way of life that permeates the northern locality, or even their family traditions. Thus, a concern for “sustainability” is present in everything that is done. The presentation discusses the interviewees’ stories about local and global challenges, dilemmas, failures, best practices and innovative solutions for sustainable organizing. The stories also problematize responsibility, work ethic, and professional pride. There is a negotiation between different narrative plots and possible evaluations of what is reasonable and justifiable in ambiguous economic, social, cultural, political, and ideological circumstances. By applying strategies of e.g. generalisation, categorisation, and particularisation, the narrators depict their own choices and actions in a proud, ambivalent, defensive etc. ways; they reproduce, challenge, mock and attack dominant cultural narratives, and present themselves as understandable, rational and moral persons and managers.