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Journal of Business Communication
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What's this?

Performing Sustainable Development Through Eco-Collaboration

The Ricelands Habitat Partnership

Sharon M. Livesey

Fordham University Schools of Business, livesey{at}fordham.edu

Cathy L. Hartman

Utah State University

Edwin R. Stafford

Utah State University

Molly Shearer

Professional Researcher/ Writer, New York

"Performativity" theory offers a useful framework for illuminating the role that organizational discourse plays in engendering new social imaginaries. In this article, the authors demonstrate this point through a genealogy and textual analysis of the Ricelands Habitat Partnership (RHP), an eco-collaboration between the rice industry and environmental advocates in California’s Sacramento Valley. Articulated here as a story of enemies becoming friends, the RHP gives life to a vision of more (if not perfectly) sustainable agriculture, where sustaining business and the natural environment can go hand in hand. The authors argue that sustainable development (like democracy or other abstract concepts) becomes "real" for businesses and for society at large through local enactment. That is, new understandings and practices of sustainability are brought into being and institutionalized through the stories that they generate. Attention to the performative effects of language points to the ethical dimensions of our own research and writing. It suggests the need to consider the potentially world-changing effects of stories that we choose to tell.

Key Words: discourse • performativity theory • sustainable development • eco-collaboration

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Journal of Business Communication, Vol. 46, No. 4, 423-454 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0021943609338664
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