Wash corporate heads! Business practice can be changed via the dispositions of executives: re-socialization towards implicit eco-sustainability

This paper argues that in addition to rational factors, the dispositions of management also decisively affect business decisions. Thus business executives’ mindset and behavioural patterns should be the target of the influence of society whenever socially important changes depend on current business practice.

The paper outlines an institutionalised framework of re-socialisation to influence the CEO sub-culture and suggests that it should be part of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agenda. The ecological sensitivity and awareness of industry are treated as a societal issue in the thesis.

The following are some of the main conclusions, organised under four different categories:

Logic of action:

• the logic of dispositions is one of the driving forces behind collective behaviour, just like the logic of deliberation, and they are of equal importance

Organisational Management:

• the dispositions carried by business executives determine which alternatives get realized as the economic and organizational practice out of the available ones

The concerns of environmental economics:

• those behavioural, lifestyle and business patterns which have a negatively significant impact on the environment are not merely superficial phenomena in contemporary society but constitute the immanent nature of the current realization of societal functioning
• if the directive, which holds that – due to the ecological risks – companies should attach as high priority to the aspects of sustainable business as to their financial performance, becomes part of the social ideology and the conceptual culture, then there is a need to establish the institutions of this social engagement within business organizations too and make this engagement self-reproducing, in terms of sociologically realistic mechanisms.
  

The development of corporate and executive responsibility:

• one possible direction of measure to make the cause of the natural environment an internal concern of corporations is the guided re-socialization of corporate executives to shape their comprehension and practice
• the personalities who show “nonyuppie” mentality, but nevertheless have a strong character and a proactive attitude would play an important role in the initial propagation of the mindset and behavioural modes demanded by the CSR agenda
  

The overall conclusion is that that ecological responsibility has to become an embedded part of executives' professional identities and their practical agency – as a disposition of stewardship. The adequate adaptation of the executive subculture develops historically, but if the ecological crisis makes an expedited procedure reasonable, the role of new institutions to socialize their social responsibilities may come into the foreground

(Adapted from the author’s text)