Conversational spaces enabling conversational contestation: Making sustainability communication in organizations political (again)

Purpose: Political frameworks, regulations and stakeholder expectations guide and evaluate corporations in taking responsibility to mitigate and/or solve climate change related problems. Consequently, organizations increasingly communicate their activities related to ‘sustainable development’ and ‘transformation’ to their stakeholders – often without a deeper communicative manifestation within organizations. With our concept of ‘conversational spaces’ allowing conversational contestation of sustainability as ‘moral compass’, we argue that internal communication plays a key role in problematizing and thus ‘re-politicizing’ sustainability which is needed to cultivate sustainability as a guiding principle of action in organizations and not ‘just’ in their stakeholder-relations. Approach: In this conceptual paper we, firstly, critically analyze the deficits in contemporary scholarly work dealing with communication of, about and for sustainability. We argue that sustainability is still communicated – and theorized accordingly – with narrow business interests and directed towards external stakeholders, neglecting the transformative power of internal communication which has led to sustainability being used as a master narrative and ‘ideological movement’, detached from internal discourses in organizations about the concrete consequences of the climate crisis or the ‘good life’. Therefore, we secondly discuss the role and potential of spaces for contestational communication within organizations about and, thus, for sustainability. Originality: The paper introduces a concept to identify and set up conversational spaces where sustainability can be negotiated and debated internally. It also explores the key characteristics of these spaces that lead to contestational, in other words, agonistic and thus ‘political’ sustainability communication in organizations.