Sustainable Development, an Energy Lens and Organisations: Exploration and Discussion

1. Purpose Sustainable development has within the call for a new understanding, an understanding that does not compartmentalise the world into separate categories but rather views the world an interconnected web of entities - a monism rather than a dualism. This paper begins by outlining the challenge of sustainable development to our understandings arguing it is asking us to embrace connectionist ontology (Boisot and McKelvey, 2010) and a non fractured epistemology. From there the paper outlines two alternatives that have been offered by scholars to enable the embrace of sustainable development, the embrace of a new paradigm or the use of Actor-Network Theory. However rather than pursue these two alternatives the paper argues that a third way, using energy as a theoretical lens for enabling sustainable outcomes maybe appropriate; particularly as everything in the universe is a form of energy as Einstein's equation E=mc 2 indicates. Energy is mass and mass is energy, the two (energy and mass) are the same, both united by a state transition. Consequently with an energy lens, there is no dualism. The paper then outlines some of the basic theories that have been offered regarding the use of energy as a lens to understand sociological phenomena before speculating on how this lens might impact the conception of organisations and what might enable more sustainable outcomes. In this latter part of the paper, there is some speculation. However the hope is that using energy as lens, despite the challenge of its reductionism, may add to the "kaleidoscope" (Boisot and McKelvey, 2010, p. 419) of tools that enable understanding. In so doing the value of this paper can be summarised as not what it proves but rather what is suggests (Fiol, 1989).

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