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Introduction
Worldwide, sustainability is a concept that has gained momentum in political, business and general public arenas in recent years because of its latent capacity as a solution to some of the most engrained global challenges modern civilization are facing (Nations, 2019). The United Nations (UN) Rio Summit in Brazil in 2012 committed governments to create a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) that were adopted in the follow-up meeting at the UN Sustainability Development Summit September 2015 in New York. Of the SDGs, 17 have now found official political agreement and been disseminated and applied on a broad scale globally with the purpose of mobilizing efforts to tackle identified global challenges before 2030.
Even though the sustainability agenda and goals reflect a chief change and challenge in the context surrounding organizations, the response is still uncertain and tentative. We still grapple in regard to actualizations of sustainability in practice for core organizational activities, e.g. strategy, learning and change, production, human resource and marketing (Siebenhüner and Arnold, 2007). Organizations are, if not in other ways, ethically and socially obligated to contribute and attempt to solve these challenges. An imperative actor and channel for the realization of outlined necessary changes associated with sustainability is thus tied to how organizations react to the call for sustainability underlining the relevance of learning and entrepreneurship for the change of organizations routines, structures and culture in the context of sustainability.
Ehnert and Harry (2012) and Montabon et al. (2016) state that sustainability is a complex and dynamic concept that see a variety of definitions in its connection to learning and development in organizations. Both contributions (Ehnert and Harry, 2012; Montabon et al., 2016) specify that recent definitions of sustainability embrace a broader and more process-oriented interpretation of the phenomenon under study. One consequence of this characterization is, for example, that sustainability incorporates more than merely economic performance sustainability in organizations and workplaces. Sustainability encompasses in a practice perspective interrelations between social and ecological systems thus underscoring the phenomenon as melting pot of different – sometimes opposing – logics, e.g. a performance logic versus a sustainability logic.
Inspired by the definition advanced by the Brundtland (1987) Commission that understands sustainability as a balance and respect between needs in the present...