Integrating Multiple Sustainability Objectives Through Deliberation: The Case of Degrowth Businesses

In times of pressing global sustainability challenges, companies need to find ways to integrate economic, environmental and social aspects into all their business activities in order to address all sustainability dimensions simultaneously without emphasizing one dimension over another. Degrowth businesses are considered to combine multiple sustainability objectives to an intense degree, while implementing elements of deliberative democracy by enabling and empowering affected people to participate in and actively shape the value creation process. Although recent hybrid organizing research points to the potential of deliberative democracy to support the integration of multiple (contradicting) objectives in organizational contexts, we lack research into the underlying processes and mechanisms. This paper addresses this research gap by investigating how degrowth businesses manage the integration of multiple sustainability objectives. Based on a qualitative-inductive analysis of in-depth interview data, a dynamic model of deliberative objective integration is developed elucidating the dynamic and iterative process of objective integration as a process of steady readjustment in order to achieve stability in the sense that all objectives are achieved simultaneously over time. This model shows that deliberation in organizational contexts represents an effective mechanism that fosters a high degree of objective integration and hence ensures the successful simultaneous pursuit of multiple sustainability objectives over time.