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A 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 the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.
The book draws on diverse sources of evidence—ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction—and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.
— 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
"Unsustainable provides an interesting, well-informed, and refreshingly critical perspective on an important topic. This account reveals Archer to be a thoughtful, sophisticated social theorist, and I recommend Unsustainable to anyone interested in the social aspects of environmental problems and, more broadly, institutional theory."
"Unsustainable contributes significantly to the fields of environmental sociology and economics by questioning the decades-old conflict of corporate sustainability versus profit maximisation and contesting the corporations’ framing of sustainability as an economic dilemma. Future work will benefit from Archer’s navigation of corporate attitudes towards sustainability measuring and reporting. This rich ethnography and theoretical exploration of corporate governance and the role of neoliberal sustainability invites more researchers to build upon the scholarship in the face of an escalating environmental crisis."
"Well-structured, well-investigated and well-argued. It is a useful intellectual contribution to political ecology, providing new ethnographic insight into the obfuscations of neoliberal 'sustainability' through an obsession with metrics that do not change the underlying market dynamics of extraction."