Abstract
Sustainability is a system’s concept and regards the dynamic balance between a dynamic artificial system and its dynamic environment. For an organization to survive as a social system it needs to be adaptive and effective while interacting and coevolving with its environment. In order to be sustainable an organization needs two things: (1) knowledge about its impacts on the world and (2) the capacity to learn and renew or innovate in response. This article explores the notion of social (or organizational) sustainability in relationship with knowledge, knowledge processing, learning and adaptation. The sustainability performance of organizational activities is considered to be a function of its impact on vitals capitals in the world. Social (or organizational) sustainability is defined as a disposition or capability of an organization to realize this balance and has two fundaments: an adaptivity-based theory and a capital-based theory. The first is the organization’s ability to adapt to environmental challenges, while maintaining its own basic pattern of identity. The second is the ability to interact with the environment in such a way that it does not degrade levels of vital capitals beyond levels required by humans (and their future generations) for their well-being. These are also the internal and external dimensions of sustainability, linking knowledge ecology with natural and social ecology. Organizational sustainability performance is in part a function of knowledge management and of the knowledge processes within an organization. In this article we present a Four Dynamics Framework with two new concepts, illustrating the role of sustainability targeted knowledge management (KM). Concerning knowledge content, KM needs to focus on high quality Knowledge of Sustainability (KoS), whereas by enhancing a continuous and sustainable knowledge creation & innovation process in the organization it realizes what we call sustainability of knowledge (SoK). Both outcome and process need good metrics, and measurement and reporting tools.
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Jorna, R.J., Hadders, H., Faber, N. (2009). Sustainability, Learning, Adaptation and Knowledge Processing. In: King, W. (eds) Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning. Annals of Information Systems, vol 4. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0011-1_20
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