ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how people make sense of their organisations' expectations of them to deliver on sustainability aspirations, and explores how their sensemaking and interpretation impacts on what they do. Organisations expect managers to contribute to espoused sustainability aspirations; however, the role of middle managers as change agents is frequently undervalued in terms of their role as connectors between an organisation's strategic and operational levels. Research suggests that managers try to find a meaning of sustainability that is aligned with the organisation's culture and prevailing organisational sense-making systems. It is very important that sustainability aspirations make sense to managers in the context of the business. Practitioner and academic writing suggests that in order to create sustainable businesses the operational managers of organisations need to enact the espoused sustainability aspirations through their daily decisions and actions. The chapter provides some insight into the existence of multiple interpretations of sustainability, depending on an individual's sense of reality.
