Licence to Talk : Sustainability Managers and their Managerial Realities within the Corporate Sustainability Paradox

Abstract: While sustainability-dedicated managers and related titles represent a profession that has hardly existed for more than a decade, it is not surprising that the field of research concentrating on these professionals is in itself relatively new. With an increasing demand for corporations to take their social and environmental responsibility, and a corporate sustainability characterized by tension and paradox, we found it of importance to explore the role and entanglements of these professionals. By analysing 17 in-depth interviews with sustainability-dedicated professionals from the private sector in Sweden, our interpretation is that sustainability managers hold the function of selling sustainability, with talk as their main weapon. Expressly, in the intersection between business-case logics and sustainability logics, sustainability managers have to, above all, make a convincing case for sustainability, inwards and outwards. Therefore, they draw dynamically on different narratives which we conceptualise in three roles: the chameleon, the pragmatic, and the nagging manager. Through these roles, we intend to capture the fluidity with which the managers relate and engage with sustainability, and hence we do not mean to ossify a role’s dynamics within a single, static or stereotypical category. We discuss these findings and concepts to the background of previous studies and existing literature.