The Future of Sustainability

Abstract

We have not learned to manage human civilization to live well on and with the earth. Sustainability as currently narrated from the destructive myth of scarcity that underlies speculative market capitalism forces humanity out of socio-material spacetime, destroys Bakhtin’s answerability and the Rabelaisian chronotope, and therefore cannot bring about a material solution to our existential crisis. A re-created critical science of management and organization inquiry is needed to bring forth a socio-material era of sustainability. Critical scholarship in subversive and creative form to confront injustice became possible at sc’MOI because of the group’s primal alienation from the dominant discourse in management and organization. An active critical perspective offers guidance for the future of sustainability in pursuing the strategy of the avoided fate, a future that entails disentangling ourselves from a narrative-imposed destiny and of reasserting the power to choose another path to sustain all life on earth.