Rogat+-+SustP+-+Who+Cares+HW+02-03-2014

Michelle Rogat Who Cares HW Assignment

> My first topic that I came to was the way society organizes it's economy and how the current for of capitalism is very unsustainable. I came across the paper cited above, "Can Humankind Change the Economic Myth?", while searching for the organization of sustainability in business for my senior thesis. I believe that our capitalist economy poses an environmental sustainability issue because the environmental externalities of business don't get accounted for, it puts the corporations in power and creates a wealth gap in our society which means that businesses have the money and power to decide how society is ran. At a certain point the role of citizens in the government is minimized because it's almost a paid for democratic system where the people who are too poor, which is the "99%", don't get a voice in how society is ran.
 * Stead, W. E., & Stead, J. G. (1994). Can Humankind Change the Economic Myth? Paradigm Shifts Necessary for Ecologically Sustainable Business. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 7(4), 15–31. doi:10.1108/09534819410061351

This article contributes to my argument by stating that the myth of economic wealth that continues to drive society is at odds with the well-being of the environment and the planet. The paper then goes on to state how big of a shift in thinking is needed to overcome this huge myth, and later discusses some ecologically-sensitive frameworks that will need to underpin this newer and more sustainable economic system. A few of the discourses and theories discussed include a paradigm shift in how science is thought of and received, systems theory, Gaia theory, a shift in how the economy is perceived, steady state economics, learning organizations, and more.

This suggests that in this article the relevant stakeholders are the businesses and corporations in the US, the US economy as a whole, and the economic ties held with US businesses. These types of changes would in fact have an influence on the global economy and therefore the world wince the US is a major player to say the least. Implications of not addressing the capitalist economic system is turn run everything like "business-as-usual", which would mean the continuing degradation of the environment and of many citizen's standard of living.

> My second topic is actually a small part of my thesis research and questions what role the elites of society play in shaping sustainability in society. In order to figure this out one would need to "study up", which is a term that describes the process of studying subjects that are in higher economic classes or have more power or affluence. I argue that a study such as this is important and worth pursuing simply because I don't believe it's been done before. As the article cited above states, studying up is less practiced and harder to carry out because it often put the researcher in precarious career positions and researchers in general simply don't have the access to those people and that lifestyle. The article goes into explaining how the higher up you go in a business the less transparent the decision making becomes and everything is done behind closed doors or locked gaits. Implications of not researching into this could be that the elites of society and business really could be playing a major role in shaping how society views sustainability and the environment in a sort of campaign and nobody would really be aware of it. This again is undermining how a democratic society works and would be preventing the sustainability movement from succeeding,
 * Gusterson, H. (1997). Studying up revisited. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology …, (1992). Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/pol.1997.20.1.114/full