Organisational sustainability: A case for formulating a tailor-made definition

Making sustainability operational within organisational practice requires dealing with three interrelated questions: A "what-question", an "attribute-question" and a "who-question". The complexity of these questions needs a tailor-made interpretation of sustainability. This paper provides a framework that can be used for obtaining such a tailor-made interpretation of sustainability. This framework is based on the notion that staff members somehow need to make sense of sustainability. By taking a cognitive mapping approach, a multidimensional space of sustainability can be deduced. The interpretation of the dimensions of this space can then provide a definition of sustainability. We illustrate the framework by obtaining an image of sustainability for a firm of consulting engineers.

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