ABSTRACT
Sustainability proposes one of the most important visions of the ideal future for societies and organizations. It has emerged from various conceptualizations and values about what the world should be, seen as a Utopia. Sustainability is a complex concept that embodies cognition, a mental representation of an image of a desired future scenario for the planet and society.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) movement is a global movement that works to reach such an ideal scenario. It has proposed 17 objectives and numerous goals and indicators to be achieved by the different nations in 2030. Despite its relevance and importance, governments and civil society have not yet clearly stated how the SDGs’ objectives should be achieved and through which process of change. It is not clearly stated how the different institutions and organizations should be modified in a process of radical change to reach such ambitious aims. The radical process of change that is needed is ubiquitous in the sense that it must develop new forms of governance including private firms, governments, civil society and citizens in general. For doing that, a theoretical background is needed, and such an approach has not yet been incorporated in the SDG movement.
Contributing to fill this gap, I analyse in this chapter how to frame the process of radical change in private firms towards sustainability and the study of which actors should impel such a process. I propose that institutional theory provides such a theoretical framework. Specifically, I concentrate my analysis based on the cognitive pillar of institutional theory and work out the concept of institutional entrepreneurs as the internal agents in private firms that can propose and accelerate a radical process of change through mainly altering their cognitions, logics and archetypes. I discuss the role that universities, particularly business schools, can play in advocating new logics, forms of thinking, values and archetypes around the concept of sustainability.
Based on a review of the literature in sustainable development, institutional theory and institutional entrepreneurs, I develop a theoretical framework in a deductive way to understand the radical process of change that is needed in the private sector to achieve the SDGs. The process of change can only occur through the recognition of certain organizational agents – the institutional entrepreneurs – that there is a serious problem in the current status quo model of doing business as usual, with its corresponding consequences on planetary limits, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the loss of strategic ecosystems and the increase of inequality in incomes between nations and individuals in society.
