Moving Beyond Sisyphus: Pursuing Sustainable Development in a Business-as-Usual World
研究美国高校中推动可持续发展的行动者如何在无响应的环境中通过社区建设、资源利用和愿景三种应对机制保持希望与韧性，对关注组织变革和可持续发展的学者有参考价值。
How do actors cope when their repeated efforts to bring change seem futile? In this qualitative study, we consider sustainable development initiatives within a U.S. higher education institution where repeated efforts by actors led to nominal change. We focus on understanding how actors sought to enact sustainable development initiatives in the face of an unresponsive context, that is, in a context characterized by pressures to maintain the status quo. We show how actors’ attempts to embed sustainable development practices into the university represent a dynamic process, characterized by periods of persistence and suspension. Our theorizing reveals that actors used three coping mechanisms to maintain focus on their sustainability goals: community building, resourcefulness, and vision. By emphasizing these dimensions of their initiatives, actors’ emotional response is focused on encouragement and hope to persist in a context that is largely unresponsive to sustainable development. Our study contributes to the sustainability literature by explicating how actors develop resilience in their efforts to pursue sustainable development in unresponsive contexts.